Kruse Kronicle

Calmly Considered: Scarcity or Abundance-- Which Is Our World?

Last month, Dr. Allan Bevere and I got together to discuss the nuances of "scarcity and abundance" from theological perspectives. Too often people from the two fields talk past each other with unfair characterizations on this topic. Our conversation hopefully shines some light.

Calmly Considered: How The Church Fails Businesspeople

Last week, I participated with Allan Bevere in a discussion centered on John Knapp's book "How The Church Fails Businesspeople (And What Can Be Done About It)." Discussion focuses on integrating our faith and working lives, with reflection on why that integration is so challenging.

Calmly Considered: Socialism vs. Capitalism-- Getting Beyond the Memes

"In this month's episode of "Calmly Considered" Michael Kruse and I discuss the complex realities of socialism and capitalism that are so often distorted by simplistic social media memes, caricatures, and politicians seeking re-election."

Thanks to Allan Bevere for hosting another fun discussion. Below the video are three articles related to our discussion you may find useful.

"Capitalism vs. Socialism is the Wrong Way to Frame Today's Economic Debate" https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/capitalism/streeter-reeves-capitalism-vs-socialism.html

 

"Capitalism vs. Socialism: What's the Difference?" https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/what-are-differences-between-capitalism-and-socialism.asp

 

"Capitalism with Scandinavian Characteristics" https://www.startribune.com/capitalism-with-scandinavian-characteristics/505916412/

Calmly Considered: Economics, the New Testament, and the 21st Century (in podcast & videocast)

This is the first installment of a once-monthly series called Calmly Considered, in which Allan Bevere and I will be discussing topics related to faith and economics. In this episode, we discuss Peter Oakes'  Empire, Economics, and the New Testament. We barely scratch the surface but hopefully some meaningful dialog. 

The Keynesian Revolution and Our Empty Economy: We're All Dead - Book Review

The Keynesian Revolution and Our Empty Economy: We're All Dead  (Quotes are from the e-book version.)

Is economics value-free? Can it be? Economics emerged alongside other social sciences in the nineteenth century, aspiring to apply the scientific method to the study human behavior. Economists draw a distinction between positive and normative economics - positive being descriptive and normative being prescriptive. The latter requires value judgments, making it beyond the realm of science. While an economist may wish to offer his or her perspective on what should be done, economics eschews prescriptive behavior. But is that the way economics works?

In The Keynesian Revolution and Our Empty Economy: We're All Dead, Dr. Victor Claar, professor of economics at Florida Gulf Coast University, and Dr. Greg Forster, Director of the Okonomia Network at Trinity International University, argue the story economists tell about themselves does not match reality. Simply reading the book title, one might assume this is another installment in the ongoing battle between Keynesianism economics and other economic theories. It is not. The authors say something transformative happened in the 1930s with the rise of John Maynard Keynes’ economics, misshaping the discipline. Virtually the entire discipline (including the free-market Chicago school and Austrian economics) battles about means to end from within the Keynesian framework. The authors conclude with thoughts on a reforming agenda but first take us on a rich historical journey.

“Economics” Before the Nineteenth Century

Until the nineteenth century, “economics” was part of moral philosophy - political economy more specifically. Philosophers and theologians made normative appeals for economic behavior. Human existence has ultimate purposes. They inseparably connected their normative prescriptions to teleological realities. The authors identify a succession of three ethical paradigms related to economic thought over the millennia.

Nature paradigm – Classical philosophy. “What sets classical thought apart is the idea that nature has purposes, and human excellence consists in fulfilling those purposes.” Wisdom comes from correctly understanding nature and its purposes. From this wisdom, we shape our daily affairs, including economic activity.

God paradigm – Judeo-Christian theology. “It began with the assumption that human beings are created by and under the authority of God, and are placed both within and over nature by God. Their economic needs and behaviors are structured by God’s design in creation and are being restored to that design through the redemption of the world in Christ, so conformity to God and his purposes was their standard for economic thought.”

Reason paradigm – Born in Enlightenment philosophy. “It began with the assumption that human beings are rational, and their economic needs and behaviors can be understood and arranged rationally, so conformity to reason and its purposes (they understood ‘reason’ to include moral reason, including teleology or purposes) was their standard for economic thought.”

Claar and Forster revisit these three historic paradigms throughout the book, demonstrating their normative and teleological components in contrast with Keynes emerging philosophy in the 1930s. The authors identify a fourth paradigm with Keynes, the Consumption paradigm. So how did the Consumption paradigm emerge?

The Beginning of Modern Economics

As scholars labored to establish economics in the late nineteenth century, there was substantial intra-disciplinary conflict about how to proceed; differing on what roles historicism, theory, and science should play. (The book gives some great history.) John Neville Keynes, John Maynard Keynes’ father, assumed the role of peacemaker. He popularized the “positive versus normative” frame and worked to move scholars beyond endless squabbling toward productive research, thereby gaining credibility for the discipline.

Despite these ambitions, economics was not born in a vacuum. From the 1890s up into World War I, societal gatekeepers saw themselves as stewards of a moral and cultural order, envisioning evermore progress and human improvement in keeping with the Reason paradigm. Decades before, John Stuart Mill had introduced homo economicus, human beings as rational, utility calculating machines. Mill and these later economists retained at least a sense of the progress teleology, even as they begin to apply the scientific method to evaluating behavior. Homo economicus was a knowingly simplified anthropology, but with research, one might imagine revision and nuance could be brought to bear over time. A variety of social changes in years prior to and through World War I rocked confidence in the progress narrative, leaving the discipline adrift. Enter John Maynard Keynes.

The Keynesian Revolution

We frequently view John Maynard Keynes as a tedious academic. In reality, Keynes was a core member of the highly influential Bloomsbury Group in London, a collection of intellectuals and artists including Leonard and Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Clive and Vanessa (Woolf) Bell, Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey. They embraced, in Keynes words, an “immoralist” philosophy devoted to pursuing pleasure. “Though they weren’t sure what the highest forms of pleasure might be, their sense was that they could be found only among their greatest loves—in intimate relationships and in things like the arts, theater, and music—rather than in more pedestrian forms of enjoyment.”

The Bloomsbury Group was disdainful of traditional values. This included values like diligence, frugality, self-control, found in the Reason paradigm. Wealth accumulation and consumerism were dehumanizing influences obstructing pursuit of pleasure. However, they believed only a select few were capable of pursuing pleasure the way they envisioned. A materialistic bourgeois existence was the best for which the rest of humanity could hope. It was the task of the elite to shepherd the masses toward this end as the elite went about their higher pursuit of pleasure. Claar and Forster walk us through how Keynes’ economics reflects this philosophy but I will jump to a couple of takeaways for sake of brevity.

The most revolutionary effect of Keynes’ influence is his reshaping of means and ends. Mill introduced homo economicus as a rudimentary construct to aid in economic inquiry, not a characterization of human essence. Within Mill’s construct was an assumption that we will rationally discern and pursue certain ends. Reason is the means for choosing between various courses of action in achieving those ends. These ends include teleological ends.

Keynes retains the idea of homo economicus but with substantial revision. With Keynes, there is no teleological purpose to guide economic behavior. “Animal spirits” drive human behavior, not reason in pursuit of meaningful action. Reason is how each individual can best satisfy animalistic desire. Consumption to meet these desires takes center stage. For Keynes, homo economicus is not simply a methodological construct. It is an anthropological given. We must base economic policy on this premise.

In the General Theory [Keynes seminal book), economics abandons its nineteenth-century ambition to moral neutrality. It no longer seeks a place alongside chemistry and physics as a detached, disinterested, purely positive observer. It becomes, once again, a practical discipline with a moral vision.

But now the moral vision is radically different. Instead of the virtue, piety, or the progress of humanity, the moral vision of the General Theory is an animalistic homo economicus whose only economic goal is to satisfy his own consumption appetites. …

Another aspect of Keynes’ influence is his introduction of “the economy.” Prior to Keynes, economics was microeconomics. It was focused on how individuals, firms, and other players make decisions. Keynes introduced macroeconomics, with its focus on aggregate economic phenomenon for a nation or other large societal entity - money supply, interest rates, aggregate employment, gross domestic product, and so on. Macroeconomics came to dominate the discipline to the point that when people hear “economics” today they think of macroeconomic concepts.

For Keynes, “The economy” is a machine-like entity employed by elites like himself and members of the Bloomsbury Group in transmuting humanity to an elevated state. Keynes was sympathetic to socialist aims but he writes:

It is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the State to assume. If the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary.

The authors note:

Keynes shares Marx’s goal of giving the state control over our economic lives, which is to say, over all the most intimate and important decisions we make. He just thinks the state can accomplish this control without seizing ownership of assets.

The authors paraphrase Keynes’ view this way:

In an ideal state, we would ‘transmute’ human nature, raising people not to care how much money they end up with after playing the “game” of money-making. However, for now we need to keep the game going. If we stop, we’ll have nothing to eat; the economy runs not on productive work but on satisfying consumer appetites. Thus it is the responsibility of government to keep the game going. Keeping the game going involves all the players being highly motivated and playing to win—“strongly addicted to the money-making passion.” The wise and prudent statesman will therefore “manage” human nature, keeping it in a state of socially beneficial greed , rather than attempt to “transmute” it toward real selflessness, at least so long as we live in the current state and not the ideal state.

Keynes has a vision of where he wants to take feckless humanity. His superior wisdom and that of people like his Bloomsbury peers will lead us there. Pragmatically, it must be done with manipulation. Moreover, some will never be transmuted. Keynes had an answer for that. He was chair of the British Eugenics Society from 1937-1944. He deemed eugenics to be most important branch of sociology.

Keynesianism and Its Rivals

Claar and Forster explain Keynes was not particularly eloquent in expressing his ideas. Articulate acolytes popularized his economic constructs. Paul Samuelson, Nobel economist and author of the leading economics textbook for decades, was probably the most important figure in advancing Keynesian ideas. However, these advocates made substantial qualifications to give us what we know as Keynesianism today.

The Keynesian advocates muted Keynes’ crusading vision and reclaimed the idea of economics as value-free science. However, they continued to embrace the view that people are bundles of appetites driven by animal spirits – Keynes’ version of homo economicus. The goal should be to maximize consumption, enabling people to satisfy their appetites. Economists should guide the economy machine in these pursuits. This was the Consumption paradigm. It effectively institutionalized Keynes homo economicus while eschewing teleological judgments.

The Chicago School (and the older but smaller Austrian School) emerged as the primary competition to Keynesian economics, rejecting Keynesian interventionism in favor of free market systems. They offered resistance to “economics” as purely about large aggregate concepts and called for greater attention to microeconomic decision making. Claar and Forster write:

However, the attention-grabbing conflict between these schools conceals a deeper uniformity. Both counter-revolutions accept most of the key elements of the Consumption paradigm. Most importantly, they accept Keynes’ redefinition of the purpose of economic systems: to maximize consumption possibilities. They also accept Keynes’ redefinition of Mill’s homo economicus, which lay at the heart of the new focus on maximizing consumer satisfaction—they accept the instrumental rather than substantive understanding of rationality, and they accept the reversal of the relationship between gaining wealth and enjoying wealth.

The Keynesian constructs became so dominant that even schools that emerged to challenge aspects of Keynesian economics have internalized core Keynesian concepts.

The Consequences

The consequences extend well beyond an intra-disciplinary dispute. To a degree unparalleled by other social sciences, economics has succeeded in exerting influence over public policy and commerce, which has had ripple effects into other societal institutions. With varying degrees of resistance, homo economicus is largely how we institutionally treat our existence.

The problem, the authors would argue, is that we are not homo economicus. Human beings are meaning makers. We see ourselves inside of teleological narratives. We want not only to experience pleasure but also to participate in activities with lasting significance. We have not only have consumption preferences but also production preferences. The impact of homo economicus is a world with greater prosperity but that is largely vacant of meaning. In an existential sense, “we are all dead.” This lack of meaning has people restless and increasingly impatient with societal institutions. A consequence is the rise in populism ranging from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders, amassing power by feeding on palpable anger and frustration.

The empty economy produces polarization, because our daily economic activities no longer convey meaning and purpose (leaving us to seek those things in extreme movements) and because our daily economic activities no longer establish shared, public moral commitments (leaving us convinced we have no common ground with our neighbors). 

A Way Forward

“What would it look like to study economics on the assumption that people really do have higher purposes in life, but that we need not agree about everything concerning those purposes?”

The authors argue that the way forward is to escape the Consumption paradigm with its “animal spirits” anthropology, and revisit teleological and anthropological assumptions. We may not thoroughly agree on every value across nations and cultures, or even within them, but our values have much more in common than we may think. Some things are good whether everyone chooses to do them.

* People have production preferences as well as consumption preferences, including a desire to participate personally in the production of the intrinsically good. A sustainable economic life must account for both types of preferences (production and consumption) at the individual and cultural level.

* Production preferences can also be understood as stewardship preferences, meaning a desire to leave the world with more intrinsic good than it had when we arrived. A sustainable economic life must account in complex ways with the long-term time frames within which people make cost-benefit calculations, at the individual and cultural level.

* People are substantive reasoners who have the right and responsibility to discern the intrinsic good for themselves and participate personally in its production. A sustainable economic life must make this personal process of discernment and participation, not impersonal aggregate metrics, the goal of economic policy and discourse.

To conclude the book the authors write:

In the long run, we are all dead—but life will go on when we are gone. We all know this, and in our economic lives we do not always behave as shallow, short-term consumers who don’t care what we leave behind. If the discipline of economics wants to understand economic behavior as it really is, it must come to terms with the moral reality of human life. To ignore normative and teleological realities is to ignore the human, and to ignore the human is strange way to conduct a scientific study of how humans behave.

If we do not care what kind of world we are leaving, our economic systems will continue to be wracked by moral anxiety and the outrage it produces. Nationalists and socialists have their own reasons for wanting to block any movement toward a moral renewal that would restore confidence in our systems, but the rest of us should be seeking such a renewal with all the energy that the urgency of our situation demands. A return to economic vitality must begin with a restoration of confidence in our economic systems and practices, on the basis of a sustainable moral consensus for a pluralistic society.

We love economics. We love it because it matters—a lot. Tough new questions that overturn old certainties are already being asked in the discipline. We look forward to finding out what comes next.

Assessment

In short: teleology matters. Claar and Forster pack a lot into this book. My summary only scratches the surface. It is well worth the read for both economists and for those who think more broadly about economics and values. While I work to be conversant with economics and the history of economic thought, I am not an expert in either of these fields. People with better bona fides will have to evaluate the veracity of details presented in this book. Yet based on what I do know, the overall argument rings true to me.

The history of how the Consumption paradigm came to dominate economics - with economists simultaneously fixating on consumption and claiming to be value free - is helpful. There is no way to do social science without anthropological models and value assumptions. Economics is no exception. Homo economicus may be useful as a methodological tool for aspects of economic research but it us insufficient as a model for grasping the complexities of human decision-making. I do not think that economics has so much rejected teleology, as it has uncritically embraced a teleology that is inadequate and subhuman.

I sense a discussion has been building on this topic in recent years. As with other social sciences, there seems to be an ongoing clash between those who pursue a grand unified theory and those who prefer more modest research into micro-level behavior from which larger models of human behavior can be derived. Economics, unlike other social sciences, is unique in that “economics” and the concept of “the economy,” a machine that can be directed toward particular ends by skillful elites, has gained considerable credibility in broader society. That likely makes challenges to macroeconomic models more difficult but the importance of economics in policy making also underscores the importance of getting underlying models of humanity right.

I think the most critical point the book makes is that “we are all dead.” Human beings have desire for the transcendent, to be a part of something meaningful, to pass on a legacy. Teleology matters. To use the authors’ words, there is a production preference as well as a consumption preference. The Consumption paradigm is dehumanizing in that it robs people across economic strata of meaning-filled work. Resurrection of meaning in daily life will have to come from moral institutions outside of economics but we cannot realize that ambition of understanding human decisions without economics. If economics is a study of human behavior, can it be said to be to accomplishing its mission if it ignores the production preference aspects of human decision-making?

I appreciate the authors’ advocacy for finding common ground on teleology across human cultures. Maybe a first step is for those of us invested in moral institutions to clarify our own values. As someone who has invested decades of service to Mainline Protestantism, it strikes me that there is profound need for Christian theology to genuinely and respectfully engage economics, and to move away from what all too often is a sophomoric and adversarial posture. Repeatedly I encounter theologians and Christian thought leaders pontificating on economic issues, demonstrating they have not made the most rudimentary attempts to grasp basic economic concepts or to represent those concepts faithfully. That is a conversation for another day. For now, we have this thought provoking tome by Claar and Forster to serve as a point of engagement. It is well worth the read.

 

"Nothing is Free: The Price Only Business can Pay to Protect Free Markets" by Dave Geenens - Book Review

Order at Amazon: Nothing is Free: The Price Only Business can Pay to Protect Free Markets.

What is the purpose of business, particularly as it relates to the welfare of employees? Economists, business leaders, and theologians engage in endless debate about this topic. Regrettably, it tends to be two separate debates with economists and business leaders talking amongst themselves and theologians talking to each other. The first debate tends to be long on economic ramifications but without considerable reflection on what moral imperatives might be at play. The second debate tends to be long on moral reflection but too often within the context of (sometimes profound) economic illiteracy. Each community tends to view the other with suspicion, if not hostility. Layer on top of this the political divide between libertarians who see only a minimal role for government intervention in business, and liberals who believe a primary purpose of government is to intervene in economic affairs to ensure equitable outcomes, and you frequently end up with unproductive heated debates.

This inability to reflect both economically and morally on such questions leads to significant compartmentalization, so well described in John Knapp’s How the Church Fails Business People (and What Can Be Done About It. See my blog series on the book here.) Businesses frequently dissuade people from bringing their morals into the workplace. Pastors are reticent to approach the topic, except in platitudes, feeling inadequate to wrestle deeply with economic implications. Some businesspeople prefer not to hear about such topics at church (either distrusting the pastor’s understanding or because they see church as a safe haven from the cares of the world) and most pastors are content to oblige. (And from my experience, those pastors do that do aggressively raise the topic, frequently do so from a variety of deep ideological convictions that tend not to generate helpful dialog and reflection.) Yet what we need is “courageous conversations,” as Knapp calls them, where we genuinely explore how work and faith interact. But how do we begin such a conversation?

Dave Geenens, Director of the School of Business and Graduate Business Programs at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, has given us a wonderful gift in starting courageous conversations with his new book Nothing is Free: The Price Only Business can Pay to Protect Free Markets. This is NOT an academic treatise. It is a fable.

Geenens prefaces the story noting:

One of the first lessons I learned in business was that nothing is free. Free freight? There is no such thing. That simply means that the cost of freight is covered by profit made elsewhere. By one, get one free? The cost of the second item is covered in the margin of the first one. Interest free? The cost of interest is absorbed in the profit made on the sale of the item. Nothing is free.”

The book introduces Rebecca Morton, founder of the franchise business Cupcakes and Coffee, based in Atchison, Kansas, just as the corporation is about to go public. Rebecca is wrestling with the implications of what this means for her and her business, particularly with the increased focus on increasing shareholder value. Then she meets Brother Mark, a Benedictine Monk. Throughout the book we listen in on Rebecca’s conversations and inner reflections as she tries to make sense of it all.

Geenens draws on Roman Catholic social teaching to highlight the good that business is intended to do. At the risk of spoilers, if business fails to live out its charge to care for the well-being of its employees, other institutions (namely government) must intervene to correct the inadequacy. Advantage gained by business through the neglect of employees and failure to the good it is intended to do isn’t free. The cost is increased government intervention.

What is the good that business is to do and how do we achieve it? It is a complicated question that Geenens does not directly answer. Instead, he invites us to consider the four cardinal virtues: justice, wisdom, courage, and moderation. How might these inform us as we think about the intersection of work and faith? I won’t give away the whole story here. Geenens’ ideas are pulled together into one image at the end of the book, but you’ll need to buy the book to see what I mean.

The book is well written and accessible to most audiences. (No degrees in economics or theology required.) I can see this as a wonderful selection for a church book club, any community of business professionals interested in integrating faith and work, as well as a text for college or graduate classes. Despite the explicitly Christian context of the story, I think the book has merit beyond discussion in religous communities as we think about business ethics. The book is a wonderful discussion starter … a great starting place for a courageous conversation. Buy your copy now at Amazon: Nothing is Free: The Price Only Business can Pay to Protect Free Markets.

The Value of a Person Versus the Value of Labor (Part 1)

(Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)

On what basis should people be compensated for their work? Economists say the value of labor is a function of supply and demand. Wages should correspond to the economic value of work. Theologians often object. (Note: We are all theologians but here I’m referring to those formally educated in theology.) They say it dehumanizes people. People are not faceless cogs in a machine to be differentially valued based on their economic contribution. Everyone is equal in God’s eyes. Income and wealth should be shared equitably.

What do you think? How do we sort this out? Is one right and the other wrong? My short answer is that human beings are created in the image of God. We have intrinsic value that transcends any instrumental purpose we might serve. The goods we produce do not have intrinsic value. Value is set by the interaction of a community’s subjective desire for a good and the good’s objective availability; so also with an hour of labor. God sets the value of people while the community sets the value of particular types of labor. The value of a person’s labor is not an indicator of a person’s intrinsic value. And that leads to some important theological and economic challenges. Let us unpack this.

Humans are unique. We have a hybrid existence. On one side, we are like creation and unlike God.  We are material beings. We share much in common with other mammals. We have bodies subject to the laws of thermodynamics, just like the rest of the material world.

On the other side, we are like God and unlike creation. We are spiritual beings. We have the ability to love, to see beauty, to reason, to create, and to discern morality and meaning. We are meant for eternal life.

We are a body and spirit fusion. These two realities must be held together. We are not spirits inside of bodies. In the end, we believe in “the bodily resurrection,” not transformation into spirits. In the language of Genesis 1:27, we are the image of God … eikons … in the created order. Not eikons in the sense of lifeless statues, but rather as God’s agents, discerning and acting in ways that are so integrated with God that God’s character and purpose are evidenced through us.

As agents, we have a mission. Genesis 1 and 2 give us the grand stories of creation that highlight that mission but due to our preoccupation with what these stories might say about origins we often seem to miss the point. I’m persuaded that origin is not the driving subject of these stories. The purpose of these stories is to articulate God’s sovereignty and our mission.

I think the best way to understand Genesis 1 and 2 is by analogy. Imagine creating a garden in your backyard. There are two phases. First, we take a plot of ground that is “formless and void” of the vision we have in mind. We remove rocks and weeds. We loosen the soil. We might add some fertilizer. We plant some seeds. Maybe we put a protective border around the garden and put up a fence to keep animals out. Having done so, we are done with the first phase and we “rest” from “creating” the garden. But the garden is not done.

In the second phase, the garden must be continually weeded. The fence must be monitored and repaired as needed. Plants must be protected from hard freezes or hail. There will be occasional watering. Some plants may need regular pruning and others will yield fruit that periodically needs to be harvested.  Only when the garden has come to full flourishing can we say the garden is complete.

Genesis 1 and 2 are phase one of God’s garden project. When God is finished creating, Genesis says God rested. Phase 1 was done. Now it was time to enjoy bringing it to fullness. In keeping with this narrative, Hebrews 4:1-11 says that God has been living in this seventh day of rest since creation. But this second phase work is not work God has chosen to do alone.

At the end of the sixth day of creation, God creates eikons of God’s self, and gives them the mission of exercising dominion over creation. Despite various perversions of “dominion” as a right to do as you please, the idea here is that human beings are God’s agents participating with God in realizing God’s vision. I will not unpack this all here, but in view is humanity as God’s vice-regents over creation and creation as God’s temple in which we serve as priests. Human beings are intended for loving communion with God as they and God go about the work of bringing “the garden” to full potential.

Now I do not understand the early chapters of Genesis to correspond to historical events. They are stories that relate profound truths about God’s vision and mission, and humanity’s role in that vision and mission. In short, God is sovereign over creation and human beings are God’s image-bearing agents in the world, participating with God and each other to realize God’s ends. Genesis 3 and onward reveals humanity’s sin and failure to embrace this mission. The biblical narrative is the story of God’s redemption and reclamation of that vision, even as God continues to “work the garden” and bring us into that work. Revelation records that in the end, “You have made them [redeemed humanity] to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth." (Rev 5:10) Priests and vice-regents.

Let us return to the question of value. Value is subjective. Nothing has value without someone to do the valuing. This is true in all cases but one. God alone has intrinsic value. No one can set God’s value. "There is one God who is father of all, over all, through all and within all." (Eph. 4:6) All value ultimately extends from God.

What the biblical narrative tells us that God values creation but humanity is valued in a way that is apart from the rest of creation. Human beings are God’s image bearers, springing forth from the love and communion of the Trinity. Human beings have immeasurable value in God’s eyes. Because God values human beings, we have intrinsic value by extension. It is God’s intention that human beings, individually and corporately, should thrive. Consequently, the measure of a shalom-filled community is one where all of the members thrive together. All human beings are precious in God’s eyes. As Christians thinking theologically and economically, a key end has to be a community where all have resources and opportunities to thrive. Sharing in material abundance is a component of that vision. But it is not the only component. … 

(Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)

Faith and Business - Michael Jinkins

Huffington Post Business: Faith and Business - Michael Jinkins

The church has a knack for depreciating the vocations of the laity. Well, perhaps not all vocations of the laity. The church routinely blesses vocations like the helping professions and education, especially if they are in the not-for-profit realm. But the church is ambivalent, at best, when it comes to blessing the vocations of those folks whose business is, well, business. I find this troubling, since the overwhelming majority of Christians I know are working in the business world just making a living.

The problem the church has with business has as much to do with an ignorance of economics as a flawed theology of vocation. When pastors and theologians begin talking about economic matters, I often cringe, not only because of their lack of knowledge in the fields of financial and economic matters, but because of the thinness of the theological reflections. Usually such conversations reflect little more than the individual's biases dressed up in theological language to dress down someone else's interests. ...

Michael Jinkins is the president of Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. I can't tell you what an encouragement it is to hear a Presbyterian seminary president come forward and raise this issue. I have made the case in public and in private for just this emphasis for nearly ten years as I have served the denomination at the national level. I have made the case that church renewal begins when people begin to see the connection between what they do in their daily lives and God's mission. I occasionally caught an ear here and there but largely what I experienced was acute indifference. To hear the president of one of our seminaries acknowledge the deprecating (and I will add "demonizing" in some contexts) attitude toward people in business and lack of economic acumen is such an encouragement. Blessings on you, Dr. Jinkins, and may your tribe multiply among our denomination's hierarchy.

Jinkins mentions Presbyterian John Knapp's (now president of Hope College) How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it). I blogged through the book two years ago both here and at Jesus Creed. The index is here.

If you are interested in a couple of books about basic economics from a Christian perspective I would recommend Bulls, Bears and Golden Calves: Applying Christian Ethics in Economics, written by John Stapleford, a professor of mine when I was at Eastern University.

Also, Economics in Christian Perspective: Theory, Policy and Life Choices by Victor Claar and Robin Klay.

Does God Ordain Us to the Hardware Business?

I preached at Pine Ridge Presbyterian Church, in Kansas City, MO, on March 16, 2014. The sermon begins by wondering if it is appropriate to ordain people to the hardware business. The sermon text is Genesis 12:1-4 and the real issue is ministry of work in everyday life. I think this is the first time I have ever preached on this topic. See what you think.

PRPC Mar 16 2014 from Jay Waddell on Vimeo.

Revisiting Wealth - Bob Lupton

This is a from Bob Lupton, FCS Urban Ministries, in the Urban Perspectives newsletter. He is always thought provoking. This issue was especially good! (Note: Urban Perspectives allows copying these articles if attritbtion is given.)

Revisiting Wealth

Wealth.  A sign of God’s favor. At least that’s how it was viewed in Old Testament times.  Wealth was equated with prominence, influence, leadership, and yes, even righteousness.  Consider Job and Abraham.  Oh yes, there were evil and corrupt rich men to be sure.  The prophets took them on.  But generally riches were seen as evidence of God’s blessing.  That’s why the disciples were so puzzled by Jesus’ pronouncement that it was harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. “Well who can get in, if not the wealthy?!” they questioned.  It was clear that they viewed wealth like most other devout Jews – as a sign of God’s favor.  Their Teacher was casting an entirely new (and dubious) light on the nature of riches.

Money, power, prestige – these would no longer be the measures of prominence in this Kingdom Jesus was introducing.  Meekness, humility, compassion – these would become the defining attributes of greatness.  Rich people could certainly join, He said, but this new order of things would be difficult for them – difficult to divest their personal assets rather than contine to accumulate more, difficult to subordinate their privileged status to those of lesser social standing, difficult to place their security in God rather than in their wealth.  It would not be impossible, He said, just difficult.  Matthew the tax collector was case in point, and of course the very wealthy Zacchaeus.  Luke the physician was another.  But by and large the wealthy were relegated to lower standing in the pecking order of the Kingdom.  It was all upside down – the first being last and the last first.  Big change from Old Testament to New.

And so the value of being wealthy was turned on its ear.  The well-off became suspect.  It was a rich man who treated poor Lazarus poorly and was condemned to eternal damnation.  A rich young ruler too tied to his wealth to become a follower. A proud rich man in the Temple whose offering was unacceptable.  A successful farmer who took early retirement who was declared “a fool.”  Deceitful Ananias and Sapphira, tragic examples of rich folk who held out on God.  Wealth became associated with self-indulgence, with mercilessness, with arrogance, with fraudulence.  As a matter of fact, one is hard pressed to find a single reference in the New Testament affirming wealth as God’s blessing.  Warnings, yes, but no recognition of its essential role in Shalom.

But just behind the scenes, unmentioned but clearly present, were wealthy supporters of this Kingdom.  Zacchaeus was still one of the richest men in Jericho even after he made restitution and gave half his money to the poor.  And what about Matthew’s tax business and Luke’s medical practice?  And the women of means who supported the Messiah campaign?  And members of the early church that sold property to underwrite the church budget?  Oh yes, wealth was there alright.  It’s just that generosity and self-sacrifice and living by faith were the themes that got the sermon coverage.

But then, how could it be any different?  Everybody in the early church was readying for the eminent return of the Messiah.  Everyone was on a short-term schedule.  Don’t even get married, the apostle Paul urged.  Put all your energy into preparedness for the second coming.  But Christ didn’t return as expected.  (Not yet.)  And so in time everybody began settling into a new normal of church and community life, some thriving, others surviving.  The themes of generosity, self-sacrifice and living by faith imbedded themselves in the culture of the church.  Wealth remained suspect.  The apostle James made quite sure that the rich were not shown deference.

And so the issue churns.  Those who create wealth continue to receive the warnings while those modest souls who live off the benefits of the economy that wealth-producers create receive the affirmation.  John Coors, a very wealthy and very devout Christian, calls it an “industry of making the rich feel guilty.”  Billionaire Robert Kern, who loves the church but endures the judgment, has allocated a large portion of his estate to educating ministers in the fundamentals of how the economy works.

“Give it all away,” Jesus said.  Even your second coat.  Don’t concern yourself about tomorrow.  Budgeting?   Trust a miracle.  Hmm.  Does the One who holds the economies of the world in his hand not realize that thoughtful planning and responsible investing are essential for stable societies?  Was it not He who gave the promise of prosperity to Israel if they would keep His commands?  Was He not the One who warned Joseph in a dream about seven years of famine that would befall Egypt, and positioned him to plan ahead during seven years of plenty?  How then are we to understand this radical “take-no-thought-for-tomorrow” departure from divinely guided resource management?

He came to fulfill the law, not do away with it, He said.  Don’t abandon the God-given teachings and principles of the past – take them to a deeper level.  The blessing of wealth is meant for the Shalom of the entire community, not to be hoarded for personal sumptuousness.  Managed well, it provides a stable lifestyle for a workforce and their families, stimulates ancillary enterprises, contributes to the prosperity of the whole village or region.  No, He did not come to destroy Shalom but to inspire it.  Admittedly, He did use some highly provocative words and actions to shake up a religious culture that was misusing wealth to amass personal power, privilege and possessions.  Scattering stacks of money-changers’ cash all over the Temple portico floor was a bit extreme perhaps.  But sometimes dramatic intervention is required when greed and self-indulgence become acceptable norms within the Temple community.  And He certainly did that!

But perhaps the time has come to bring theological balance back to our understanding of wealth.  2000 years of cautions for those who have the gift of wealth creation may be an adequate length of time to make the point that mammon is seductive, that one’s heart must be carefully guarded against its enticements.  At a time when the entire world is awakening to the reality that healthy economic systems are fundamental to the elimination of extreme poverty, perhaps this is a moment for resourced members of the Western church – who have unparalleled capacity to create profitable businesses – to step forward.  Perhaps this is the time when the church begins to see itself as more than a purveyor of compassionate service, but as a catalyst of just and fruitful economies.   Might this be a turning point when the wealthiest church in history awakens to the reality that their job creators are the very ones gifted by God to bring economic wholeness to struggling souls too long resigned to unending poverty?

Proof Jesus Was Not a Capitalist: The Richest 1 Percent Own Half the World's Wealth - My Response

Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite has a post at the Huffington Post today titled Proof Jesus Was Not a Capitalist: The Richest 1 Percent Own Half the World's Wealth. Here is my response.

She writes:

...Biblically speaking, probably not. As Jesus warned, you have to choose. Either money rules you, or your highest values rule you. There's no middle ground. "No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money." (Luke 16:13)

Jesus was not a capitalist.

God's rules on economics, as articulated both by the prophets and Jesus of Nazareth, are strikingly clear. Not small concentrations of great wealth and the vast majority of people in poverty, but 'each under their own vine and fig tree, living without fear.' (Micah 4:4) Jesus announces his ministry as "good news to the poor" (Luke 4:18), that is, the "Jubilee," the really radical redistributive economic strategy of ancient Israel.

So, is it likely the leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos serve that vision, a vision of a reasonable abundance shared by all, or are they in service to the vast accumulated wealth of the 1 percent? Is it going to be possible for people at that meeting to enact policies that start to close this disastrous economic gulf between the rich and the poor? ...

First, advanced agrarian societies of the Near East and Rome are the context of the Bible (Hebrew and Christian Testaments.) The economy, to the limited degree they even thought in macroeconomic terms, was a zero-sum game. Land and labor were the two inputs for production. Both were relatively fixed. There was little you could do to alter the productivity of land and one person’s labor was not substantially different from another's. Consequently, with variable productivity off the table, economics was constrained to considerations of consumption and distribution. Both personal and societal abundance was cyclical and sharing of the fixed pie was essential for community survival.

The great divergence of the past two centuries or so is the realization that productivity can be radically altered. Through the application of technology, energy, exchange, stable institutions, and improving human capital, productivity can be radically altered. But these changes have included the need to concentrate wealth into productive assets and assume larger risks in order to effectively achieve greater productivity. We live in a different world from advanced agrarian societies and trying to apply morals from their context directly to ours is useless.

Second, the Jubilee was categorically not a “radical redistributive economic strategy.” Land was to revert back to its perpetual owners every 50 years. Jubilee stated that if someone needed to “sell” their land, then the price would be determined based on the number of crops that could be gathered between the “sale” date and the next Jubilee. Then the land would revert back to the perpetual owner. In other words, it was a lease. A person could “sell” their labor on the same conditions. These provisions only applied to agricultural land and it had nothing to do with non-agricultural land or other private property. Significantly, it ensured that everyone had access to at least a minimal level of capital (land and labor) to provide for themselves and to produce goods for exchange, living individually and corporately as God’s stewards. That has interesting theological implications for thinking about economics but it was not radical redistribution.

Third, from where does abundance come? Apart from maybe air and sunlight, name one thing that humans use that does not require human action to transform matter, energy, and data from a less useful form to a more useful form? Absent human action, there is near absolute scarcity of the things that humanity uses. If we each had to provide for ourselves and our families alone, our days would be a precarious existence, doing little else but hunting and gathering our way through life. But through specialization, technology, concentration of wealth in productive enterprises, and trade (i.e., capitalism) we achieve high levels of productivity resulting in unprecedented abundance. Had Jesus known that productivity could be radically altered, I suspect he may have offered different guidance (and I don't mean a blanket blessing of the American economic system.)

Fourth, just what is the negative impact of inequality that should give us pause? The article doesn't say, but it is strongly implied: If wealth is becoming concentrated at the top, then it must be that it is being taken from others, making them poor (1% are wealthy while 99% are in poverty) ... the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. She is not alone in this thinking.  A recent survey of Americans showed that 66% of respondents think that the proportion of the global population living in poverty has doubled in the past twenty years and another 29% think there has been no change (total of 95%), when in fact the proportion has been halved:

Source: Brookings

Furthermore, the number of well-paying jobs is expanding around the world. Life expectancy at birth, the most holistic measure of human well-being, is now at 70 years and closing in on the 80 year mark enjoyed by the wealthiest nations. Studies show that inequality within nations is increasing but inequality between nations is falling.

Now none of this is to say that rising inequality is good or bad. We have to be specific by what metric we use. If the metric is that inequality means more poverty and is therefore bad, then the assertion the inequality is "bad" isn't true. People are not getting poorer. That doesn't mean inequality isn't problematic for other reasons but we need to specific about what we are tackling.

Finally,

“Unregulated market capitalism has only one master, and that is money. And that is why 85 people control half the wealth of the whole world.”

Dr. Thistlethwaite, if you identify one nation on the face of the earth that has “unregulated market capitalism,” then I will right you a check for $1,000 right here and now. They don't exist! This issue is not unregulated market capitalism but corporatism.  If there is a governance problem it is that the biggest corporate entities and government have joined together to stack things in favor of their mutual interests over and against market forces that might threaten them. That is corporatist business capitalism and antithetical to market capitalism. Furthermore, economists have not reached a consensus on why there has been an increasing concentration at the top but the idea that it is summed up in “unregulated market capitalism” is just absurd.

With all that said, I’m not saying that growth in inequality isn’t a problem and that it isn’t worthy of theological and moral reflection.  I am asking for a more responsible discussion.

I will also agree that change largely begins from the bottom up. Muhammad Yunus uses the image of a bonsai tree. The seed that grows into the tiny bonsai tree is the same seed that grows into the tall tree in the forest. The difference is that the bonsai grows from the limited foundation of the flower pot while the tall tree has the rich foundation of the forest bed. The poor are bonsai people. By improving the soil in which they grow, by instituting property rights and rule of law, by including them in networks of productivity and exchange, they too can flourish as people in wealthier nations have. Trickle-up capitalism is a promising strategy. It is already at work around the world. Let's joing them and support them. Populist ideological warfare about poorly defined issues and remedies is nothing but a moralistic distraction. The world deserves better from Christian thinkers.

Church is not Worship, Community, or Mission. It's All Three

Rachel Young has a thoughtful article at the The Presbyterian Outlook's Outpost blog titled, Consumers, missionaries, or worshipers? She writes:

... We use the language of buying and selling, of efficiency, of getting the best product for the best price, even as we think about our relationships, our work, our leisure, our church.  We are consumers.

I don't have space in this post to offer evidence for these big claims.  Check out Hugh Halter and Matt Smay's book And: The Gathered and Scattered Church for an evaluation of how this metaphor seeps into churches.  The consumer metaphor invites us to seek church experiences that fit our interests and time.  We go to church to get our spiritual needs met.  If I were to modify the answer to the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism (see below for the actual answer), the consumer might say, "Man's chief end is to connect with God by listening to a great message and hearing great music." ...

So maybe, as some suggest, a better metaphor is missionary. She writes:

... So, we might modify the Westminster Shorter Catechism to say, "Man's chief end is to partner with God to redeem and restore our hurting world."

The missionary metaphor compels me.  But, what I find lacking in both of these metaphors is the primacy of worship.  Is the gathering of a church only functional?  To give people a feel good experience or to shape them as missionaries?  Or, are the people of God called first to worship God and then be sent?  The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism actually reads, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever."

I hear her concerns and I know they are widely shared. I hear similar concerns expressed across the church. But I think pitting these various metahpors against each other, or prioritizing one over the other, IS the problem. I commented in response:

I like how Stan Ott talks about church as three-dimensional: doxological, koinonial, and missional. Or more simply: worship, community, and mission. The three are inseparable. I think classifying desire for a meaningful worship experience as consumerist is overly harsh. It is pursuit of that experience above all else that is destructive. I would also say that pursuit of worship as prior, or over and above the other two, is problematic.

Genuine worship draws us into community and inspires us to mission. Genuine community is worshipful and it is in community that we discern and do mission. Mission is a worshipful response to God and deepens us in community as we do it together. All three aspects must be held together.

There is an ongoing debate in the church about a (false) dichotomy of community (and personal nourishment) versus mission. I sense some want to lift "worship" up as the "third way" out of this conflict. Instead, I suggest that the answer is to boldly embrace all three.

The Gospels of Sin Management

Jesus Creed: The Gospels of Sin Management and Their Empty Allegiance

American evangelicalism is what it is because of its gospel. Dallas Willard calls its gospel the “gospel of sin management.” American liberal Protestantism is what it is because of its gospel. Dallas Willard also calls its gospel the gospel of sin management. (Some of you will know I call this gospel the “soterian” gospel in The King Jesus Gospel.) Its emphases — right and left — is forgiveness of sin, eternal life in heaven, assurance in the here and now, and either an act (decision) or acts (good deeds) are the precipitating element that gains a person access to salvation. ...

... They have an “empty allegiance” to Jesus. You’re in whether are a transformed into Christlikeness or not. ...

... On the Right, the gospel is “vampire faith” (they want Jesus for his blood), it is shaped by atonement theology and obsessed with atonement theology, and it is about “relief from the intrapsychic terrors of fundamentalist versions of hell” (149).

On the Left, the gospel is about “good acts” and activism and “self-determined acts of righteousness” (149). So the Right is about proper beliefs and the Left about proper behaviors. The gospel is about conformity to Christ in a God-bathed kingdom reality. ...

My comment in response:

I think part of the solution is recovery of the significance of everyday life and work. The primary locus of ministry for most of us is our home, our workplace, and our neighborhood. It is with and for those who are in our circle of influence. And when I say "ministry" here, I don't mean using these contexts as staging opportunities for evangelism (though evangelism will occur) or as opportunities right injustices (though righting injustices will occur). I mean seeing our participation in these aspects of life, the living and work that is done there, as integral with serving God.

I think it needs to be noted that the soterian gospel of the right and left places the locus of "ministry" in the pastors and ecclesiastic institutions, elevating the centrality and importance of those connected with these institutions. Conscious or not, there is considerable psychic investment to keep things the way the are because of the affirmation and status it brings. The rest of church becomes amateur helpers to the evangelism/justice professionals, which is okay by many of them because they can go do their good deeds as prescribed by the professionals while living most of the rest of their lives as practical atheists. All in all, an effective codependency.

Business as Calling

Last summer I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Thom Thomson, professor of finance at the University of Texas. Dr. Thomson was in Toronto a week ago preaching at his brother's church, Every Nation, Greater Toronto. The topic was "Business as Calling." This is a wonderful presentation!  You can find the 30 sermon at Faith & the Marketplace Part 2: BUSINESS AS CALLING or by clicking below. For some reason my player indicates it will 78 minutes long but it is actually about 30 minutes. (Disclosure: At 11:40 into the sermon the author of the controversial Facebook post was me. I was intrigued that Dr. Thomson picked up on this post because I have privately used the responses to to the post as an example of the deep cynicism toward business held by so many theological professionals.):

Here is the sermon setup:

A leading personal finance magazine published its list of the 10 best fields of study based on the potential they had of offering a steady, well-paying career. Some of you may already be pursuing these studies or are in these business areas, such as Pharmacy and Pharmacology, Nursing, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Management Information Systems and Treatment Therapy Professions.  As we read the New Testament in the Bible, we come across other popular professions: Jesus was a carpenter. Paul was a tentmaker. And Peter was a fisherman. All noble business pursuits providing a valuable service to the community and offering a means to make a good living. Our city – Toronto – is built on business. So how does faith enter the equation? Does it have a place? This week Dr. Thomas Thomson, a finance professor at the University of Texas, continues our series by giving us a fresh perspective on how faith can positively affect business and how business can be a worthy calling. Join us, and bring a friend, to Innis Town Hall at 10:30 a.m.

Six Ideas on How to Lead Congregations to Integrate Work and Discipleship

The High Calling: Six Ideas on How to Lead Congregations to Integrate Work and Discipleship

“How can we create a congregation where work and discipleship are truly integrated?” This is a question I am hearing more often, even though much has been written about a theology of work in recent years.

Pastors and church leaders are looking for a programmatic strategy. I don’t think there is one. ...

This is a piece I wrote for the High Calling. They posted it yesterday. What do you think? What ideas do you have?

Saturday Links

1. The Economist has an interesting graph showing the captialism has led to greater happiness in member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union countries excluding the three baltic countries.)

2. AEI has an informative piece on economic mobility in the United States: How’s the American Dream doing? Well, which one?

There are two ways to define economic mobility: 1) absolute mobility, whether each generation is financially better off than the one before; and 2) relative mobility, whether you can change your income rank  vs. your parents. Most Americans probably think both measures important. We want to be more prosperous than mom and dad, but also be able to change our circumstances and make our dreams come true. ...

... A San Francisco Fed study – using data tracking families since 1968 — looks at both versions of the American Dream, finding one healthier than the other. Looking at absolute mobility, researchers Leila Bengali and Mary Daly find the United States “highly mobile.” Over the sample period, 67% of US adults had higher family incomes than their parents, including 83% of those in the lowest birth quintile, or bottom 20% (versus 54% for children born into the top quintile, or top 20%.) ...

3. Concerning gender income inequality, Mark Perry says ‘Studies’ that compare average wages by gender, without controlling for demographic factors, can’t be taken seriously

4. Clive Crook thinks an ownership society may be the answer to reducing wealth inequality: Liberals Should Embrace the Ownership Society

... It’s true that conservatives’ standard proposals for privatizing Social Security and voucherizing Medicare would shift risk onto beneficiaries -- but this plainly isn’t a necessary consequence of the basic principle. I agree with Konczal that adequate insurance against economic risk, underwritten by the government, is essential. I also agree that most conservatives aren’t interested in providing that guarantee. That’s exactly why liberals ought to take up the ownership society themselves.

Ownership entails risk, it’s true, but insurance can minimize it. Ownership also provides control, independence and self-respect -- things it wouldn’t hurt liberals to be more interested in. And when it comes to inequality and stagnating middle incomes, ownership can give wage slaves a stake in the nation’s economic capital.

Done right, an equity component in government-backed saving for retirement could be the best idea liberals have had since the earned-income tax credit (oh, sorry, that started out as a conservative idea as well). ...

5. Scientific American: Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, Transform Higher Education and Science

6.Scientific American also has interesting piece on how Brain Researchers Can Detect Who We Are Thinking About

FMRI scans of volunteers' media prefrontal cortexes revealed unique brain activity patterns associated with individual characters or personalities as subjects thought about them.

7. Gizmodo reports that Sex in Space Could Be Deadly.

Researchers already knew humans, animals and plants have evolved in response to Earth's gravity and they are able to sense it. What we are still discovering is how the processes occurring within the cells of the human and plant bodies are affected by the more intense gravity, or hypergravity, that would be found on a large planet, or the microgravity that resembles the conditions on a space craft.

8. Walgreens Building First Self-Powered Store

According to estimations, engineers expect the the store to generate around 265,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. Store operation will only require 200,000 kWh, so perhaps that extra wattage could be pumped back into the grid or used to power nearby utilities.

9. CNN reports on How online ruined dating ... forever

When people can browse potential dates online like items in a catalog, geo-locate hook-ups on an exercise bike just seven feet away, arrange a spontaneous group date with the app Grouper or arrange a bevy of blind dates in succession with Crazy Blind Date, it makes me wonder if all this newfound technological convenience has, in fact, made romance that much more elusive. Now, we may be more concerned with what someone isn't rather than what they are. And as that twenty-something entrepreneur reminded me over coffee, services like OkCupid, and even Facebook, sap a lot of the mystique out of those first few dates. So, sure, it may be easier than ever to score a date, but what kind of date will it really be?

10. Interesting piece on Why Do People Use Nope Even Though No Is Shorter?

11. Is the New Pope More Liberal Than the Last Two? Why It's Hard to Tell. Emily Chertoff offers some insightful analysis.

12. Michael Bird offer this quote from Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew's "The Drama of Scripture" in his post The Importance of the Narrative of Scripture.

Many of us have read the Bible as if it were merely a mosaic of little bits – theological bits, moral bits, historical-critical bits, sermon bits, devotional bits. But when we read the Bible in such a fragmented way, we ignore it’s divine author’s intention to shape our lives through its story. All humanity communities live out some story that provides a context for understanding the meaning of history and gives shape and direction to their lives. If we allow the Bible to become fragmented, it is in danger of being absorbed into whatever other story is shaping our culture, and it will thus cease to shape our lives as it should. Idolatry has twisted the dominant cultural story of the secular Western world. If as believers we allow this story (rather than the Bible) to become the foundation of our thought and action, then our lives will manifest not the truths of Scripture, but the lies of an idolatrous culture. Hence the unity of Scripture is no minor matter: a fragmented Bible may actually produce theologically orthodox, morally upright, warmly pious idol worshippers! (p. 12).

13. Scot McKnight has a great piece on what constitutes legalism: Legalism: Old and New Perspectives

14. Thom S. Rainer on Ten Things Pastors Wish They Knew Before They Became Pastors

1. I wish someone had taught me basic leadership skills. “I was well grounded in theology and Bible exegesis, but seminary did not prepare me for the real world of real people. It would have been great to have someone walk alongside me before my first church.”
2. I needed to know a lot more about personal financial issues. “No one ever told me about minister’s housing, social security, automobile reimbursement, and the difference between a package and a salary. I got burned in my first church.”
3. I wish I had been given advice on how to deal with power groups and power people in the church. “I got it all wrong in my first two churches. I was fired outright from the first one and pressured out in the second one. Someone finally and courageously pointed out how I was messing things up almost from the moment I began in a new church. I am so thankful that I am in the ninth year of a happy pastorate in my third church.” ...

Read the whole thing.

15. Joseph Sunde rates the 5 TV Shows That Demonstrate the Importance of Ordinary Work

Is Scientific Materialism “Almost Certainly False”?

Scientific American: Is Scientific Materialism “Almost Certainly False”?

... Some scholars, notably philosopher Thomas Nagel, are so unimpressed with science that they are challenging its fundamental assumptions. In his new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Nagel contends that current scientific theories and methods can’t account for the emergence of life in general and one bipedal, big-brained species in particular. To solve these problems, Nagel asserts, science needs “a major conceptual revolution,” as radical as those precipitated by heliocentrism, evolution and relativity.

Many pundits calling for such a revolution are peddling some sort of religious agenda, whether Christian or New Age. Nagel is an atheist, who cannot accept God as a final answer, and yet he echoes some theological critiques of science. “Physic-chemical reductionism,” he writes, cannot tell us how matter became animate on Earth more than three billion years ago; nor can it account for the emergence in our ancestors of consciousness, reason and morality. ...

... These qualms asides, I recommend Nagel’s book, which serves as a much-needed counterweight to the smug, know-it-all stance of many modern scientists. Hawking and Krauss both claim that science has rendered philosophy obsolete. Actually, now more than ever we need philosophers, especially skeptics like Socrates, Descartes, Thomas Kuhn and Nagel, who seek to prevent us from becoming trapped in the cave of our beliefs.

Theology in Advent Hymns and Carols

Christmas Day I wrote about my appreciation for O Come, Emmanuel, because I think it captures the biblical story better than most Advent songs. Jeffrey Barbeau has some good thoughts in is humorously titled Don’t Let N. T. Wright Steal Christmas!

Peter Leithart, remarking on the trendsetting biblical criticism of N. T. Wright, has questioned the way that many (presumably English) Christmas hymns fail to capture the political and social context of the birth of Jesus Christ. Leithart claims that Advent hymns (unlike Christmas hymns) capture the here and now. Advent hymns declare, in this way, a crisp, prophetic vision towards a world gone astray: “They are deeply and thoroughly and thrillingly political. Advent hymns look forward not to heaven but the redemption of Israel and of the nations, the coming of God’s kingdom on earth.”

For Leithart, we would all be better off ridding ourselves of hymns that fail to include the deeply political and social aspects of the original Christmas story. “Wright is no Grinch,” he claims. “He didn’t steal Christmas. What he stole was a false Christmas, a de-contextualized and apolitical Christmas. But we shouldn’t have bought that Christmas in the first place, and should have been embarrassed to display it so proudly on the mantle. Good riddance, and Bah humbug.”

As one who studies the literature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Christianity (the period that gave us so many of our great English hymns), I must admit that some of Leithart’s critique rings true. Indeed, some of our most beloved hymns contain precisely the kind of otherworldly message that Leithart deplores.

Before we call for a moratorium on Christmas hymns, however, let’s remember that these hymns often contain powerful reminders of profound and, I daresay, eschatological change. We would be wise to listen. ...

Saturday Links

(Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.)

I hope you had a great Christmas and are enjoying the holidays.

1. The Huffington Post offers their top religion stories of 2012: 2012 Religion Stories: The Top 10

2. David Gushee reflects on Glen Stassen's A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age: The illnesses of American Christianity

"... The first kind of Christianity avoids reactionary authoritarianism but is often a therapeutic or vanilla mush that fails to ask anything of anybody out of fear of giving offense. The second kind of Christianity offers stern, clear moral directives that attract people seeking the “specific instruction, even confrontation that calls us to grow in discipleship” (p. 6), but disastrously embraces right-wing ideology and baptizes that as the content of Christianity.

Both of these versions of Christianity are so deeply flawed, says Stassen, that both are contributing to the alarming spread of secularism in the U.S. The first version of Christianity is so thin as to lack any particular reason why one would want to get out of bed on Sunday and go to church; the second is so reactionary as to drive thoughtful people into an anti-religious posture if they conclude that religion equals right-wing authoritarianism.

I believe this is a stark but actually quite accurate depiction of the primary problems afflicting the Protestantisms of the left and of the right in the current U.S. setting. ..."

3. When New England Progressives Won't Tolerate Evangelicals. "Once a center of 19th-century evangelism, Northfield, Mass., is unsettled by the prospect of a school with religious aims."

4. Peter Enns with yet another provocative post: What do Turkey, Bethlehem, and Tennessee Have in Common? They Don’t Bode Well for the Conservative Christian Subculture

5. Peter Liethart offers a book review of Peter Brown's new book, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 Ad, at Christianity Today: How the Early Church Made Peace with Prosperity. (And, no, I don't know why everyone seems to be Peter this week ... Enns, Liethart, and Brown.)

6. Why Latin Americans top the happiness rankings

"While not exclusive to Latin America, the culture of family, support, and living a life to spend time with your family, I think, is an important part of Latin American culture that keeps people positive. Being with those close to you and finding other friends and partners that value that way of life is a key part of Latin American culture. That might be the main reason why people remain positive: they are never truly alone. Interestingly, many discussions and documentaries about immigrant groups in the United States show an internal conflict among many who move to the US and who do not wish to lose their support systems in a new culture rooted in individualism. While being motivated and entrepreneurial is valued, a life being with your family, where you are never truly alone, is the basis for many cultures in many parts of the world. Many new Americans frown on the thought that children can detach themselves from their family at 18 years of age. They believe people can only truly thrive as a family."

7. In contrast to Latin American happiness based in family connection is this survey of British children that revealed that A 'dad' is tenth most popular Christmas list request for children.

8. Christian Science Monitor reports on Parental leave global comparison: US still among least generous

9. And in yet another story on familial collections China orders children to visit their elderly parents.

10. Scientific American reports some positive news: Early Childhood Obesity Rates Might Be Slowing Nation-Wide

11. Men may want to think twice before taking up yoga. It seems men are more prone to serious injury from yoga. Wounded Warrior Pose

12. What are the ten most popular books of all time? The 10 Most Read Books In The World

13. Traditional Books On Decline, Survey Says

"A Pew Internet Research Center survey released Thursday found that the percentage of Americans aged 16 and older who read an e-book grew from 16 percent in 2011 to 23 percent this year. Readers of traditional books dropped from 72 percent to 67 percent. Overall, those reading books of any kind dropped from 78 percent to 75 percent, a shift Pew called statistically insignificant."

14. Here are nine interesting findings about state by state data from the Census Bureau: Here Are The States Where People Are Leaving, Moving To, And Having Lots Of Babies

• Puerto Rico, Vermont, and Rhode Island are the only states (and territory) that saw a net decrease in population over the year.
• The fastest growing region was the South (1.06% population growth) followed by the West (1.03% population growth).
• North Dakota and the District of Columbia had the highest population growth, with 2.5% and 2.3% population growth, respectively. Texas, Wyoming, and Utah also saw major growth.
• West Virginia and Maine are the only two states where people are dying faster than they are being born, with 0.93 and 0.99 births for each death.
• Utah (3.44) and Alaska (3.33) had the highest birth to death ratio in 2012. That means 3.44 babies were born for each death in Utah.
• Domestic migration determines the rate that people leave and enter states to and from other states. Per capita, more natives left New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island to move somewhere else than any other states.
• On the other hand, people flocked to North Dakota, D.C., Wyoming and South Carolina.
• The states that had the highest rates of international migration — that is, the rate of immigrants coming in — were Hawaii, New Jersey, Florida, New York and D.C.
• Puerto Rico is seeing a massive exodus — 1% of their population left last year.

15. When we think of transportation in the United States, few of us think about river and costal water transportation. Yet a great many goods and commodities are shipped on our rivers. The Midwest drought is having an impact on a major artery of that transportation network. The Mississippi River's Water Levels Are Dropping, And Could Shut Down Trade Next Week

16. Facebook?! Twitter?! Instagram?! We Did That 40 Years Ago. "Three decades before Yelp and Craigslist, there was the Community Memory Terminal. ..."

 

 17. America's Stuff Is Getting Really Old, And That's Bullish

"In other words, Americans are increasingly likely to have to purchase and replace these goods some time soon as they get more and more worn out.  That's bullish for spending, jobs, and the economy as a whole."

18.From right here in my hometown, just a mile or two from where I live: In a Kansas City Neighborhood, Deep Investments and an Uncertain Future. The Atlantic Cities reports on Kansas City's experiments with Green Impact Zones.

19. Why are men, in aggregate, better navigators than women? National Geographic: Of Men, Navigation, and Zits

"... Yet a few differences between the sexes do seem to hold up to scrutiny. One is spatial abilities. If men look at an object, for example, they are slightly faster at guessing what it would look like if it were rotated 180 degrees. There are plenty of women who do better than individual men. But overall there’s a stasticially significant difference in their average performance. This kind of difference carries over from one culture to another. It’s even detectable in babies. ...

... Whenever we reflect on human evolution, it pays to compare our species to other animals. And in the case of spatial abilities, the comparison is fascinating. Almost a century ago, the psychologist Helen Hubbet found that male rats could get through a maze faster than females. The difference can also be found in a number of other species. ...

... Clint and his colleagues propose a different explanation: male spatial ability is not an adaptation so much as a side effect. Males produce testosterone as they develop, and the hormone has a clear benefit in terms of reproduction, increasing male fertility. But testosterone also happens to produce a lot of side effects, including male pattern baldness and an increased chance of developing acne. It would be absurd to say acne was an adaptation favored by natural selection. The same goes for the male edge in spatial ability, Clint and his colleagues argue. They note that when male rats are castrated, they do worse at navigating a maze; when they are given shots of testosterone, they regain their skill. ..."

O Come Emmanuel

This past year I read Scot McKnight's The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited and the N. T. Wright's How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels. Both scholars have reminded us once again how disconnected we have become from the world of Jesus and the early church. For us, Christianity goes from creation straight to Jesus’s birth, then to the crucifixion and resurrection, after which we get the "real" theology of Paul, talking about individual sin and salvation. The Hebrew Testament is seen as peripheral background information and Jesus's life and ministry are compressed into moralistic teachings about personal piety and personal salvation. The biblical witness is so much bigger than this.

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of Christmas music. I don’t care for many of the hymns. But one carol that has stuck with me over the years is O Come Emmanuel. It is believed that the lyrics may date back to at least the 8th Century, well before the Reformation and the framing of the gospel that came from with those events. Of all the hymns, it seems to me that this one comes closest to capturing the sentiments that people in Jesus's day must have felt.

 

O Come Emmanuel

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan's tyranny
From depths of Hell Thy people save
And give them victory o'er the grave
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Day-Spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
And death's dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Key of David, come,
And open wide our heavenly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, O come, Thou Lord of might,
Who to Thy tribes, on Sinai's height,
In ancient times did'st give the Law, In cloud, and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

Are There Too Many People on the Planet?

Conservation Magazine: Are There Too Many People on the Planet?

... Here’s what I bet goes on when this question is posed—and I want to say up front that I think this way myself. I do not like long lines and traffic jams. I do not like that I have to drive 60 minutes to get to a decent natural area or that when I get to the Cascades for my hike, I’m likely to run into dozens of others on the same trail. I do not like how built up our coastline has become and how hard it is to get access to beaches. And so on.

In other words, I do not like the impact of “too many people” on my personal happiness. Rarely do we admit that this is the basis of our concerns about human population. Instead, we couch them in terms of “exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity” or “causing the extinction of species.” ...

... And when we so easily jump to the conclusion there are too many people on the planet, what solutions does it suggest? Who should be eliminated? Who should not be allowed to have children? And who gets to decide? Is it really that there are too many people on the planet? Or is it more about the kinds of settlements and economies we have built?

Lastly, the entire notion of too many people neglects those studies showing that large numbers of people, especially concentrations of people in cities, are engines for innovation and cultural advances. (4) For example, new patents and inventions overwhelmingly come from cities—and the larger the city, the more patents and inventions are produced. ...

... More importantly, the question of whether there are too many people is the wrong one for conservationists to ask. The right questions are: What quality of life do we want all people on the planet to share? And how can we achieve that quality of life while preserving as many species and ecosystems as possible?

Conservation of nature has a lot to contribute to answering those questions and to enhancing that quality of life. So don’t automatically nod in agreement when a colleague says: “The problem is, there are too many people on the planet.” People can be the solution as well as the problem.

It is popular these days to decry consumerism ... and rightly so. Voices in our world tell us that our life consists of the products we buy and the things we own. It is materialism.

But the irony is that many consumerism critics fall prey to is their own form of materialism. They see human beings primarily as subtracting from a fixed stock of resources. Human beings are parasitic, adding nothing. Reduce the number of humans and you save the planet.

Human beings do not just consume, though that is part of our reality. All forms of life consume. But human beings also add to the world in a way that other beings in the created order do not. They add creativity and intelligence to the world. With creativity and intelligence come beauty, ingenuity, community, and flourishing.

There are challenges. Through unlocking powers of productivity and exchange we have found we can radically improve the material status of people around the world. But we find we have to adapt our methods and perspectives to sustain the changes we have made ... doing more and more with less and less, as we minimize our destructive impact. We have to find ways to be stewards of the world that recognize more than just our material quality of life. As Christians, we know that sin often twists our creativity and intelligence toward destructive behavior. The answer to these challenges is not to dehumanize people by framing them in materialistic terms as consumption units. Rather it is to work toward unlocking and unleashing the creativity and intelligence of everyone as we work for a flourishing shalom-filled world.

Living as an Authentic Christian in a Non-Christian World

Huffington Post: Living as an Authentic Christian in a Non-Christian World - Richard Stearns

After the election, I published an article in this space that struck a chord with many Christians. I suggested that engaging in a bitter 'culture war' in order to preserve America's formerly dominant Christian culture has been largely a failed strategy. We cannot win in the courts and at the ballot box that which we have lost in the court of public opinion. Instead, I argued, we should embrace the strategy that has successfully attracted people to Jesus for two thousand years - authentic Christianity.

What if we simply stuck to what Jesus commanded us to do: love our neighbors as ourselves, care for the poor and the sick and the brokenhearted, stand up for the oppressed, be generous with our time and our money, and live winsome lives filled with grace and gentleness?

Christians have always lived, and often thrived, in cultures where they are minorities. Christianity began in a Jewish culture and thrived in a pagan Roman one. The apostle Paul, writer of nearly half the New Testament, actually offers advice to the church in Corinth which lived in the midst of a very pagan society. His words should guide us today.

In I Corinthians 5:9, Paul encourages the Christians to clean up their own affairs. The church was in a mess with sexual shenanigans, internal bickering, and a deep division between rich and poor. Paul gives them some advice, but he also says Christians shouldn't worry about whether others follow Christian moral teaching.

"I wrote you in my earlier letter that you shouldn't make yourselves at home among the sexually promiscuous. I didn't mean that you should have nothing at all to do with outsiders of that sort. Or with crooks, whether blue- or white-collar. Or with spiritual phonies, for that matter. You'd have to leave the world entirely to do that! ... I'm not responsible for what the outsiders do, but don't we have some responsibility for those within our community of believers? God decides on the outsiders, but we need to decide when our brothers and sisters are out of line and, if necessary, clean house. (I Cor. 5:9-13, The Message)

Paul's point is this: Be strict with yourselves, expecting fellow Christians to obey the demands of Jesus. But don't hold others to the same rules. ...

Stearns post also brought to mind another passage I recently read. I just finished going back through Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon.

“In fact, much of what passes for Christian social concern today, of the left or the right, is the social concern of a church that seems to have despaired of being the church. Unable through our preaching, baptism, and witness to form a visible community of faith, we content ourselves with ersatz Christian ethical activity – lobbying Congress to support progressive strategies, asking the culture at large to be a little less racist, a little less promiscuous, a little less violent. Falwell’s Moral Majority is little different from any mainline Protestant church that opposes him. Both groups imply that one can practice Christian ethics without being in the Christian community. Both begin with the Constantinian assumption that there is no way for the gospel to present in our world without asking the world to support our convictions through its own social and political institutionalization. The result is the gospel transformed into civil religion.” (Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens, 1989, 80-81.)

There is much I resonate with in Stearn’s post and with the Resident Aliens quote, but I shade things a little differently.

I don't have a neat label for my position. Maybe what I see is a polarity. I'm uneasy with the overemphasis of social activism within my Mainline Reformed world, partly because of its domestication of "justice" to contemporary leftist framings. But mostly I'm uneasy because of the neglect of the central mission of the church to be a "sense-making" witness of God's Kingdom by connecting the daily routines of life to God's mission in the world, to be a communities reflecting on the contexts and relationships where they have genuine authentic influence and being the body of Christ in those particularities.

And yet I'm uneasy with quotes like those above, and similar cases made by neo-Anabaptists, that seem to suggest we should not be seeking to influence the state at all. If some ways of ordering society are more just than others according to God's Kingdom, is it appropriate to remain silent in the public square as citizens of a democracy where we are invited to interject what wisdom we may have? And curiously, it seems to me that while many of those who want to avoid entanglement with the state have a stronger sense of the congregational community, they also have a weak practical theology for how the people of God, as they live dispersed in the world, are to make sense of work and daily life as the relate to God's mission in the world.

Rather than embracing either the activist Reformed pole or the neo-Anabaptist separatism, I'm inclined to embrace the strength's and cautions of both camps and to press for better integration of daily life with God's mission in the world.

What do you think?

Saturday Links

Here are the links for this week. Lots of interesting finds this week and not nearly enough time to blog.

1. Google Fiber offers super-fast broadband to Kansas City. If all goes well, we will get connected late spring of 2013.

2. Two Thirds of Ocean Life Remains Undiscovered. If they haven't found them, how do they know?

3.  "British people - and many others across the world - have been brought up on the idea of three square meals a day as a normal eating pattern, but it wasn't always that way." Breakfast, lunch and dinner: Have we always eaten them?

4. What is the optimal rate of taxation according to the Laffer Curve? Goats hold the answer. Goat Economics: Why the Laffer Curve Is No Joke

5. The print media industry is rapidly morphing right before our eyes. Google Ad Revenue Now More Than U.S. Print Publications Combined [CHART]

6. Cyberspace continues to evolve. Text Messaging Declines in U.S. for First Time, Report Says

7. "It's a common grumble that politicians' lifestyles are far removed from those of their electorate. Not so in Uruguay. Meet the president - who lives on a ramshackle farm and gives away most of his pay." Jose Mujica: The world's 'poorest' president

8. You may have heard that there was a presidential election last week. Here is a map showing how the counties voted, with red being the most intensely Republican and blue being the most Democrat. (Source: The Real Reason Cities Lean Democratic)

9. Speaking of the election, there has been a lot written about how the GOP will need to change if they want to win national elections. As a right-leaning guy, I thought this article in Slate, The New Grand Old Party, and this one by Bobby Jindal, How Republicans can win future elections, were among the best.

10. China continues to work on technological innovations that will address their water problems. Industry Special: Desalination tech helps slake nation's thirst for fresh water.

11. The world is going to the dogs. The Dog Economy Is Global—but What Is the World's True Canine Capital?

12. As manufacturing becomes more automated, requiring fewer workers, we see The Emerging Professional, Scientific, and Technical Sector.

13. Nanotechnology just keeps getting more amazing. "The latest invention from Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering sounds like something a superhero would have. A self-repairing plastic-metal material has been developed by a team of professors, researchers and graduate students." New Self-Repairing Material Invented at Stanford

14. For the true narcissist, you now have the ability to replicate your image in 3D. 3D-printing photo booth gives you a figurine instead of a bad photo

15. Speaking of 3D-Printing, how big a deal is it? "Chris Anderson has exited one of the top jobs in publishing - Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine - to pursue the life of an entrepreneur, making a big bet that 3D printers represent a massive new phase of the industrial revolution." Chris Anderson: Why I left Wired - 3D Printing Will Be Bigger Than The Web

16. The debate about an historical Adam continues. Peter Enns with another interesting post, Who Needs a Historical Prometheus…uh, I mean Adam?

17. George Bullard asks, When is a Church a Church, and When is it a Flash Mob?

"A flash mob (or flashmob) is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a place, perform an unusual and seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and artistic expression. Flash mobs are organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails." [Wikipedia accessed 11.12.12] How do you define a church?"

18. This was me thirty years ago (in my dreams!)

19. Ever wonder how Cy Young award winning pitcher R. A. Dickey manages to throw knuckleballs? Apparently, so do physicists. How a Baseball Star’s Tricky Pitch Strikes Out Hitters—and Baffles Physicists

20. I loved these stat brain teasers. 5 Statistics Problems That Will Change The Way You See The World

Find balance between subsidiarity, solidarity

LaCrosse Tribune: David Olsen: Find balance between subsidiarity, solidarity

... The principle of solidarity is a sense of the common good, of the natural and supernatural connections that bind us one to another, and of our responsibility toward one another.

In individual cases, the application of the principle is a reminder of the clear moral imperative that the wealthy exercise their sacred obligation to aid the less advantaged and to work toward the betterment of everyone. ...

... This principle of solidarity in relationship to government action means that state government — and many times the federal government — are appropriate vehicles to direct the use of wealth collected through taxes or otherwise for the common good. We see this in such things as unemployment insurance and in Social Security. ...

... Subsidiarity is the principle that says that in matters economic and political, the preference is always to be given to the most local level of authority that can handle the matter. We don’t appeal lemonade stand issues to state regulatory authority; at least I hope not. So, too, with questions such as traffic, employment issues and health concerns solutions should be found at the most local level possible.

This principal does not negate the idea that sometimes the federal government must be involved, but the preference is clearly for solutions to be found at the local level if possible. ...

... Catholic social teaching emphasizes the application of both the principle of subsidiarity and the principle of solidarity. The two are not meant to be mixed and balanced; instead one principle acts as a check on the other principle.

There is no Christian doctrine that clearly defines when and how the two principles are to be applied, when one is meant to be used to check the other. Instead, the application of the two principles — subsidiarity and solidarity — where one principle limits the over-application of the other principle, is an exercise of prudent judgment.

A pretty good summary. What more would you add or what would you qualify? Did you see my post from earlier today? Moderation Polerization Through Polarity Management. Do solidarity and subsidiarity form a polarity?

Saturday Links

Here are this week's odds and ends that didn't make it on to the blog. Enjoy the leftovers!

1. MIT Technology Review says Geoengineering Could Be Essential to Reducing the Risk of Climate Change. "Using technology to cool the planet may be the only way to deal with the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, argues scientist David Keith." On a similar topic is this piece by Robert Kurlwich at NPR, Will We 'Fix' The Weather? Yes. Should We Fix The Weather? Hmmm. Kurlwich discusses the possibility that we may one day be able to control the earth's climate and wonders if that is a good thing.

2. Research indicates that Millennial Generation Becoming More Fiscally Conservative.

3. Are E-readers a transitional technology? Analysis: E-readers grapple with a future on the shelf.

4. Inhabitat reports on The World's First Commercial Vertical Farm Opens in Singapore. "The dense metropolis of Singapore is now home to the world’s first commercial vertical farm! Built by Sky Greens Farms, the rising steel structure will help the city grow more food locally, reducing dependence on imported produce. The new farm is able to produce 1 ton of fresh veggies every other day, which are sold in local supermarkets."

5. The New Republic has a very lengthy article The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It offers some interesting insights in to Mormonism's road from communalism to economic individualism, a trajectory followed by many Protestant sectarian movements. Jackson Lears writes:

"Mormons embraced economic individualism and hierarchical communalism; they distrusted government interventions in business life but not in moral life; they used their personal morality to underwrite their monetary success. They celebrated endless progress through Promethean striving. They paid little attention to introspection and much to correct behavior. And their fundamental scripture confirmed that America was God’s New Israel and the Mormons His Chosen People. It would be hard to find an outlook more suited to the political culture of the post–Reagan Republican Party."

6. Annie-Marie Slaughter maintains that the "having it all" debate about work-life balance isn't just about women. Work-Life Balance as a Men's Issue, Too.

"A number of students asked foreign policy questions, and then a young woman asked me about the responses I have received to my Atlantic cover story from this past summer, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." I answered, and several other young women followed up. After ten minutes or so, I saw that the roughly 50 percent guys in the room had gone completely silent. When I commented on the suddenly one-sided nature of the conversation, one young man volunteered that he "had been raised in a strong feminist household" and considered himself to be fully supportive of male-female equality, but he was reluctant to say anything for fear he would be misunderstood. A number of the other guys around the table nodded in agreement."

7. French and Spanish legal documents from colonial Louisiana are being digitized, opening up a new window on colonial history in that part of the world. Colonial La. records shed new light on US history

8. People who know me personally know I tend to use sarcasm and double entendre in spoken communication. One of my biggest blogging challenges is editing most of this out of posts. Emoticons can help but some of the biggest misunderstandings I have had came from people not being able to see my wink or big grin as I write certain things. For that reason, I found this interesting: The Strange Science Of Translating Sarcasm Online

9. Ever wonder why sign language often seems so animated? Why Great Sign Language Interpreters Are So Animated

10. Africa: sociologists cite religion as a key factor in preventing and alleviating AIDS epidemic

"In their new book "Religion and AIDS in Africa" (Oxford University Press), sociologists Jenny Trinitapoli and Alexander Weinreb seek to challenge the widespread view that religious beliefs and communities have unwittingly assisted in the spread of the disease through their resistance to preventative sex education. They also show that not only have religious groups had a largely positive role in AIDS prevention, but also how the epidemic has shaped religious beliefs in unexpected ways."

Creation Groans; But Why? (RJS)

Jesus Creed: Creation Groans; But Why? (RJS)

RJS is a Chemistry professor who is a a regular blogger at Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed blog. It is a fascinating take on the Romans 8 passage where Paul talks about all creation groaning. She writes:

... Most of the commentaries on Romans 8 I’ve looked at trace the reference back to Genesis 3. This includes John Stott, F.F. Bruce, and N.T. Wright, scholars for whom I have a great deal of respect. So I put forth my thoughts with a bit of caution, but it seems unlikely to me that Paul’s thought was fixed on Genesis 3 as the source of his reflection on creation in Romans 8. Rather, it seems more likely that his primary source was the prophets and the whole of Israel’s story. Images of the earth groaning because of the sins of Israel are common in the prophets. ...

 and

... In the imagery of the prophets there is a curse on the earth. But this curse is not the result of Adam. It also is not a change in the physical nature of the world.  It does not reflect some cosmic change in the laws of physics worked by God in response to sin. In a figurative and physical sense, the earth groans result of the covenant unfaithfulness of Israel. Romans 8 turns this dark image around to an eager expectation of the renewal that comes through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, according to Scripture, and  thereby through the renewed children of God, transformed by the working of the grace of God.

I don’t put any of this forward as a final answer – but think it is a topic worth some thought and discussion.

This is part of larger discussion that sees Genesis 1 talking about God ordering creation and Genesis 2 as talking about the formation of Israel. I'm curious to know what the theological brain trust of Kronicle readers think. What do you think?

Finding God in Advertising

(re)integrate: Finding God in Advertising  Bob Robinson

In a profound chapter in A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture, Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor look at how advertising has shaped contemporary society. The authors offer “Ten Commandments of Advertising,” all of which point to an overarching question that people in this (and every) culture ask: “What is it to be fully human?”

“This is the question that advertising seeks to answer, a question that was one the pursuit of philosophers and theologians. Advertising is an incredibly powerful form of pop culture that influences us on levels far deeper than getting us to choose certain products. Life choices are part of today’s world of advertising and consumption. ‘The glory of God,’ Irenaeus wrote, ‘is a human being fully alive.’ In contemporary society, to be fully human is to shop. Advertising offers us ways to be alive, ways to be human.” (p. 84)

Certainly, there are ads that are manipulative and appeal to the baser aspects of human depravity in order to sell products. But advertising, at its best, appeals to our desire to know who we are, to celebrate life, to find meaning in being human. ...

I especially liked this statement:

Christianity needs to “re-message” itself as a faith that embraces the joy of God restoring humanity and encourages celebration. The restoration of all things is in our future. We await the return of Jesus Christ with great anticipation. What are we doing in preparation?

The primary vision of the church today, liberal or conservative, is to offer people meaning and transcendence by extracting them out of the daily routines of life, rather than equipping people to see transcendence in those daily routines. We do it in the form of therapeutic pietism or in the form of activism to change the world. And if you are really "spiritual" you will enter "full-time ministry" to do these things.

(Bob wrote a great post here. He recently began (re)integrate, which is devoted to addressing just the kind of issues the post raises. Be sure to check the website.)

 

Where have you seen examples of the church equipping people to see transcendence in the routines of life? How might we do a better job of celebrating life?

Take a Load Off — The Rest of Life - Ben Witherington

The Bible and Culture: Take a Load Off — The Rest of Life

For some time now I have been working on a series of bite sized books on Kingdom or eschatological perspectives on mundane or ordinary life. There is one on the Kingdom itself (Imminent Domain–Eerdmans), one on worship (We Have Seen his Glory–Eerdmans), one on work (Work– Eerdmans), one on money (Jesus and Money– Brazos Press), one on spiritual formation (The Shared Christian Life– Abingdon), and finally now one on ‘the Rest of Life’–Rest, Play, Eating, Studying, Relating (including sexual relating). Each of these books are under 200 pages, and intended to promote more serious theological and ethical reflection on the things we do most of the time every single week.

What has constantly amazed me in doing this series of books is how few predecessors amongst Biblical scholars I have had in writing on several of these subjects. It’s as if we are not talking about soteriology or theology proper (the doctrine of God) or some forms of eschatology, then we must not be doing theology or ethics. It’s strange. ...

AMEN!!! (Oppps. Did I yell that outloud.)

... The irony is that this little 168 page book, like it’s predecessors, is all about eschatology, or better said, taking an eschatological look at the ordinary. The question being asked in answered in each of these books is— What difference does it make if we view these ordinary things of life in light of the already and not yet eschatological activity called the Kingdom of God? My answeer, as you might imagine, is ‘much in every way’. If we are seriously about our eschatology, both present and future, this should absolutely change the way we view all these subjects— worship viewed from the end backwards looks different, and so does work, and money, and marriage, and rest, and play, and spiritual formation etc. ...

As I read this, my mind went back to a post I did years ago with a lengthy quote from Miroslav Volf, Miroslav Volf on Theology of Work.

Given the paramount importance of work in both liberal and socialist economic and social theory, it is remarkable that in our world dominated by work a serious crisis in work had to strike before church bodies paid much attention to the problem of human work. Theologians are to blame for the former negligence. Amazingly little theological reflection has taken place in the past about an activity that takes up so much of our time. The number of pages theologians have devoted to the question of transubstantiation – which does or does not take place on Sunday – for instance, would, I suspect, far exceed  the number of pages devoted to work that fills our live Monday through Saturday. My point is not to belittle the importance of correct understanding of the real Presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper but to stress that a proper perspective on human work is at least as important. ...

The post excerpts a few more paragraphs but you get the picture.

There have been a few scholars who have ventured into this territory Dr. Witherington is talking about. Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens are two who come to mind. But it really astounds me that virtually no one I talk to in the church hierarchy or in the academy has the remotest interest in championing a redress of this indifference. And yet I am thoroughly convinced that there cannot be, and there empathically will not be, any renewal in the church until large numbers of Christians come to see how the work and activities of daily life connect with God's overarching mission in the world. All the efforts to extract Christians out of the world into our evangelistic or social justice programs will have no impact.

Thank you, Dr. Witherington, for tackling these issues. May the theological tribe you spawn multiply and prosper.

How to Eat, Play, Love—And Do Other Christian Acts

Christianity Today: How to Eat, Play, Love—And Do Other Christian Acts

Thirty years ago, Ben Witherington III prayed for the energy to write a commentary on every book of the New Testament. This he has done, in addition to writing several other books, including a two-volume work of New Testament theology and ethics. Now, at age 60, the prolific author and Asbury Theological Seminary professor has turned his attention to activities that make up, he says, "99 percent of people's ordinary lives." The result is his latest release, The Rest of Life: Rest, Play, Eating, Studying, Sex from a Kingdom Perspective (Eerdmans). Rachel Marie Stone, author of the forthcoming Eat with Joy: Redeeming God's Gift of Food (InterVarsity), spoke with Witherington about the need for theological and ethical reflection on the everyday things of life. 

Having written many scholarly volumes, why are you now turning your attention to the "ordinary" things of life?

 

There is very little serious theological reflection on the ordinary Christian life: the things we do every day, like working, playing, eating, or going to church. I wanted to ask, "What do these things look like in the light of the coming kingdom of God? Where did God intend all these things to go?" I wanted to somehow take a global view that would work toward the integration of all these things in the mundane life: keeping in balance work, worship, play, sex, and so forth. The aim was to fill a gap in theological reflection.? ...

... What do you want readers to take away from this book?

What we are, and what we do in life, is tremendously important to God, to the kingdom of God, and to ourselves. When we think about our Christian faith and how we spend our work week, faith should not be something that we do on Sunday, but something that shapes our worldview and how we live.

So whether we eat, play, rest, go to a concert, or conjugate the word "to love," it is all doxological, which is to say it's about giving praise to God and preparing us for the kingdom. The question we should ask about anything and everything is, Can I do this to the glory of God and the edification of others? If the answer is no, a Christian shouldn't do it. That's the ultimate ethical question.

I appreciate Ben Witherington's recent focus. I thought his recent book, Work: A Kingdom Perspective on Labor, was very helpful. I look forward to this new book. I hope his focusing on these topics will serve as legitimization for younger theologians to see this area of study as focus of study. There is still a huge gap between the worlds of theology and daily life, particularly work life.

 

Alternative Christianities - Philip Jenkins

Real Clear Religion: Alternative Christianities

On average, the Biblical world sees a startling new discovery of allegedly cosmic significance every four or five years. Most recently, we had Jesus's Wife, with the Gospel of Judas not long before that, and no great powers of prophecy are needed to tell that other similar finds will shortly be upon us.

In themselves, the finds are usually interesting (if they happen to be authentic), but where the media always go wrong in reporting them is in vastly exaggerating just how novel and ground-breaking they are.

So powerful are such claims, and so consistent, that it sometimes seems as if nobody before the 1970s (say) could have known about the multiple alternative Christianities that flourished in the first centuries of Christianity. Surely, we think, earlier generations could never have imagined the world revealed by such ancient texts as the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gnostic documents that turned up at Nag Hammadi. Lacking such evidence, how could older scholars have dreamed what we know to be true today: the vision of Jesus as a Zen-like mystic teacher, or perhaps a Buddhist-style enlightener, who expounded secret doctrines to leading female disciples, and who may even have been sexually involved with one or more of them? Today, for the first time, we hear the heretics speaking in their own voices!

But here's the problem. Virtually nothing in that model would have surprised a reasonably well-informed reader in 1930, or even in 1900, never mind in later years. In order to make their finds more appealing, more marketable, scholars and journalists have to work systematically to obscure that earlier knowledge, to pretend that it never existed. In order to create the maximum impact, the media depend on a constructed amnesia, a wholly fictitious picture of the supposed ignorance of earlier decades. ...

... People being what they are, I know that situation won't change any time soon. But can I at least make a minimum demand? If you are going to claim a new gospel fragment as a revolutionary scholarly breakthrough, can you at least demonstrate that it significantly advances the state of knowledge beyond what existed in the era of Herbert Hoover?

Is that too much to ask?

Historical Jesus Contrarian - Scot McKnight

Jesus Creed: Historical Jesus Contrarian  Scot McKnight

Scot McKnight writes about his contrarian view on historical Jesus studies, contrasting it with understanding Jesus in historical context. He makes five points:

Point 1: My contention is that historical Jesus studies are all about reconstructing what Jesus was really like. They are the attempt to get behind the Gospels (and the Creed) to the real Jesus, the one who walked and taught and ministered in the Galilee and Judea.

Point 2: My contention is further that this reconstruction occurs over against the church’s Jesus, which is found in the Gospels (four presentations, not four “gospels” — not four “Jesuses” either, but four gospels presenting the Story of the one Jesus in four ways) and then developed even more in the Creed. The point of departure for historical Jesus studies is that the church either got Jesus wrong or said too much. The historical Jesus will be the real Jesus over against the church’s more theologized Jesus. ...

Point 3: And my contention is that historical Jesus studies, because it is all about reconstructing Jesus over against what the church has always believed, are of no use to the church. ...

Point 4: My contention, further, is that “examining the Jesus of the Gospels [canonical Jesus] in his Jewish context” is not the same as “historical Jesus studies.” ...

Point 5: And my contention is that the Gospels are already interpretations of Jesus, that is, the Gospel writers were “historians” in some sense and strung together facts about Jesus into a narrative that was designed to “gospel” Jesus to its readers.

Reading this reminded me of a quote from Craig Hill's book, In God’s Time: The Bible and the Future. Hill is writing about academic efforts get to the "real" Jesus behind the gospels when he writes:

Can one bypass the New Testament and get directly to Jesus? Only if one is content to find a projection of oneself. To know and to listen to Jesus necessarily means knowing and listening to Matthew and John and Paul. The New Testament books are irreplaceable guides into an otherwise inaccessible territory; they are the gold standard against which all claims about Jesus must be tested. (26)

What is the Economic Question?

What is the principle question economics seeks to answer? That question to be answered has changed over time as the world economy has evolved. It is morphing even now.

I recently finished James Halteman and Edd Noell's excellent new book Reckoning with Markets: Moral Reflection in Economics. I like the following historical summary they offered as they contemplate the future.

… Again a great deal of subjectivity is involved in entertaining this topic [asking the right question], but it is no secret that the most fundamental questions in economics change from one era to another. As discussed in Chapter 2, in the ancient world the level of production was thought to be limited to the subsistence level in the long run. This belief was sustained by the perpetual struggle for survival that followed civilization into the seventeenth century. With stagnant technology and fairly constant resource and population base, the economic concerns centered on how society would be organized to see that distribution was fair within some notion of what constituted the good and virtuous life. The fact that the Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the medieval scholastics raised strong moral questions about the acquisition of wealth made perfect sense in their contexts. The key questions were distribution related, and the answers were found in moral philosophy and social ethics. Because the welfare of the soul and one’s eternal destination were of more concern than ones present economic state, the most important question of the time was how material desires could be kept from corrupting the soul.

When production technology slowly began to change and surplus beyond subsistence became a reality, social analysts started turning their attention to production and its possibilities. Adam Smith used the term universal opulence to characterize the kind of social order he envisioned. But such a social order needed a new method of organizing production, a new morality, and a new theory of distribution. The key questions were production based, and technology had to be encouraged. Adam Smith’s achievements in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations are best seen in light of this need to view social organization in a fresh way so that new concerns could be addressed. However, when production exceeded basic human needs, egalitarian ethics seemed less important and distribution issues were slowly integrated into production theory. Distribution was now dependent more on one’s productivity than on some entitlement based on social standing or the need for subsistence. The questions had changed, and economic thinking changed with them. It has evolved from the vision of Smith through the classical economists to the neoclassical theory of today. Along the way, the focus changed from the satisfaction of life’s needs to the fulfillment of wants, from steady-state existence to progress and growth.

During the last half of the twentieth century, a new challenge was emerging for economists. The increased speed of technological change brought unprecedented economic growth, but it also created disturbing gaps in the distribution of income with the developed societies and between the developed world and the less developed world. Talk of a new economy began to surface where ideas rather than physical capital drove progress and where increasing returns to production replace the standard diminishing returns constraint. In such a world, the problem of production is thought to be manageable and the economic questions are changed again. While it may never be true that the problem of production is solved, it is possible that it will cease to be the dominant concern in the provisioning of human needs and wants. Distribution and its connection to unemployment, energy availability, and environmental issues may well become center stage or at least join production in importance. Congestion in time and space will make allocation issues more controversial. These issues require increased interaction with the moral and ethical disciplines and other social sciences. For example, if parents can pick the gene combinations of their children at a very low cost, how will the preferred combinations be allocated or can everyone be granted their optimal choice? Of course the choice could be left to the free market where the demand for the preferred genes would increase the gene price lowering its net return. Such a system would require considerable change in how people think about income distribution.

If technology advances as projected and competes with the human mind as an efficient producer, then output will be less a function of human input and the marginal productivity theory of distribution will needed to be reworked or discarded. The impact of technological advance on economic theory could be enormous as it alters the key questions that economists entertain. Because of these trends, narrowly focused rational choice methodology may be inadequate to deal with the coming realities. It is important now to recognize that a considerable amount of recent work has been done to broaden the scope of economics and make it more relevant to the world as people observe it. Outcomes that do not conform to rational choice analysis are becoming increasingly apparent and interesting.

So far the analysis of rational choice has focused on issues raised in past decades. These methodological discussions have continued since the logical positivism debates of the early twentieth century. The resistance to interdisciplinary research is rapidly breaking down. By engaging in experimental practices and exploring neurobiology, psychology, sociology, the efficiency of law, cooperation, and the nature of trust behavior, economists have opened the door to moral issues that were not thought to be relevant to positive analysis. … (143-145)

I love this book. Halteman and Noell are making the case that homo economicus, the idea of human beings as nothing more than rational utility calculating machines, while possibly useful in some applications, is woefully inadequate for addressing emerging problems. Other anthropological and moral issues are becoming increasingly important. Amen.

But one of the problems not addressed in this book is how much of the theological academy is stuck in the first paragraph of this excerpt. They are intellectually living in the era of inalterable productivity, in a zero-sum world where "the issue" is how to equitably distribute a fixed pile of goods across society. They live in a world where God has created a world of abundance and where there would be no scarcity if everyone shared, as though goods drop to earth like manna from heaven, only needing to be equitably distributed.

In fact, God created the world with an abundance of natural resources but those resources have to be transformed into usable goods. Apart from air and sunlight, virtually everything we use requires human beings to transform matter, energy, and data from less useful forms to more useful forms ... in other words, production. Without production there is a near absolute scarcity.

Economists, by and large, are big on abundance. They want to know how goods become more abundant. In fact, if there is anything that betrays the idea of economics as a purely value-free enterprise, it is the widely held value that the purpose of an economy is to make goods and wealth more abundant.

Yet theologians routinely caricature economics as being about scarcity. It's a bit like saying oncology is the science of dying from cancer. Certainly onocoligists study cancer but their objective is health, not death. Likewise, economists begin with self-evident reality of scarcity and seek understanding about how to create abundance. The theological blindness to the revolution in production and simplistic appeals to abundance will not create the dialog we need.

It continues to amaze me how so many conservative Christians who continue to reject evolution, an old earth, and abandonment of patriarchal gender roles, find proto-capitalism in Jesus’s teaching. Equally amazing to me are how many progressive Christians, who seemingly embrace every scientific qualification of the Bible, readily embrace redefined social roles, and see a progressive movement of God in the world, become the equivalent of six-day creationists when it comes to economic issues, morally reasoning as though the economic revolution of the past two centuries either did not occur or should not have occurred, the fixed-sum world of ancient order being the desired state of affairs.

Haltemann and Noell have done a great job and setting the stage more fruitful discussion. I hope to come back to this book at the Kruse Kronicle in the future.

Can progressive economists join forces with the church? - Felix Salmon

Reuters: Can progressive economists join forces with the church? - Felix Salmon

Last week I was invited to hear Joe Stiglitz talk on “God, hope, happiness, death, suffering, values, grace, and evil” at Union Theological Seminary. With a menu like that, how could I resist?

The event was billed as an “innovative lecture series” combining, essentially, God and mammon: it was organized in large part by INET, an organization devoted to “new economic thinking” and backed — to the tune of $75 million — by George Soros and Bill Janeway. But, frankly, it was an inauspicious beginning, and although in principle I’m a big fan of making economics much more interdisciplinary, I think the idea of connecting it with theology, in particular, is not going to be easy or even particularly helpful.

One of the problems was that this was not a lecture: Stiglitz just sat and answered open-ended questions, and most of the time, when he did so, he talked about his latest book. The book is about inequality, and religious types tend to care a lot about inequality, but they tend to look at economics in very different ways. ...

... These are important questions, no doubt, and religious types do worry about them. But rather than looking for high levels of GDP or productivity growth, or worrying about the effects of international capital flows on domestic interest and exchange rates, the kind of people who hang out at places like Union Theological Seminary tend to have their eyes on a greater and much more eternal prize. Economists, especially on the left, love to quote Keynes’s dry statement that “in the long run, we’re all dead”; you can imagine how far that kind of rhetoric will get you in a church or mosque or shul. Religious leaders  don’t tend to rely very heavily, if at all, on empirical data; few of them feel the need to prove that they are right. And as a result, when Stiglitz took his passionately-argued economics a few hundred feet from the east side of Broadway to the west side, he entered a world which was much more alien to him than the conferences he attends in Shanghai or Dubai or Davos.

Stiglitz is constitutionally incapable of talking about economics without bashing right-wingers, and hilariously, even in a chapel, he decided to keep to his standard criticism that the economics spouted by Republicans was essentially “theology” rather than anything scientific or empirical. I have numerical proof that I’m right, he said; my opponents only have faith! ...

... [Cornell] West’s point is simple and powerful. Stiglitz, and most of the people at Union, look at the state of America, and especially at the degree of inequality, and want to change that. And if you look at the history of successful campaigns to effect change in America, they tend to be based overwhelmingly on the power of storytelling, often of the moral variety, rather than on the power (which is always pretty limited) of logical argument. Narratives — stories — move people in a way that Stiglitz’s econometrics never could. And the most powerful narratives are religious ones. ...

... Indeed, the left has its work cut out for it when it comes to shaping the kind of narratives that West was calling for: it hasn’t been able to frame inequality as a moral issue, while the right has been spectacularly successful in framing its pet causes as moral issues which should be taken very seriously by all citizens of faith.

Stiglitz responded to West by basically saying “yes, you’re right, we need people able to weave powerful moral narratives around these themes. But don’t look at me, I’m just going to keep on telling Republicans they’re wrong, using all the dry econometric tools at my disposal”.

And this is where I think Stiglitz has failed to learn from Occupy. He credits himself as being one of the driving forces behind the idea of the 1%, and of course he went down to Zucotti Park to address the crowd down there. But if they were listening to him, I don’t think that he was listening to them. He wasn’t hearing their deeply moral anger, not only at the 1%, but even at the whole structure of capitalism — maybe he’s too steeped in economics to be able to do that.

There was just one question from the audience at the event, from a woman who said that she loves the Bible. “It says there’s something deeply unhealthy about the pursuit of wealth,” she said, and she’s absolutely right about that. But you’re not going to find many economists who agree with that, and certainly Stiglitz didn’t. He’s happy to say that the very rich suffer from moral turpitude — but he doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion, which is that the things which make us rich also make us bad.

I’m not religious, and I spend my life in the world of intellectual argument — I’m naturally on the economists’ side of things when it comes to constructing narratives. I also don’t kid myself that there’s any nobility, be it moral or otherwise, in being poor. But I do see the power of religion when it comes to sending messages to the world. And I do see the left straggling far behind the right when it comes to harnessing that power. And, after attending this INET event, I see very little chance that they’re going to catch up.

Very interesting piece. I think he has identified well the gulf in the discussion between economics and religion. Economists are forever interacting with empirical data but think little about narrative. Many continue to operate under the illusion that economics can be completely value free and that homo economicus, human beings as rational utility calculators, is a sufficient anthropology.

Theologians are all about narrative but rely heavily on heuristics for economic thinking. Because theologians tend to be grounded in holy writings of advanced agrarian societies from 2000+ years ago, and grounded in moral reflection by people who have lived in the intervening time in similar societies until the past two centuries, their theology is deeply intertwined with heuristics of people from that era. Because they have a mission of looking after the poor and marginalized there is a strong tendency to frame things in Marxian categories of haves, have-nots, and power struggle, rather than being able to offer perspective on comparative models for organizing economy and the society. Because their livelihood is typically earned outside the context of market exchange, and precious few have ever received any economic education, economic modes of thinking are particularly foreign to most.

Finally, factor in the Western Church’s longstanding ambivalence, if not animus, toward business and finance, and factor in that for the past two hundred years economics has been an extension of the Enlightenment/Modernist project to develop an empirical value-free science of human behavior … particularly free from religious moralism … and you begin to see how daunting the conversation is.

Ladder of Charitable Giving - Maimonides

I've been reading Taking You Soul to Work by Paul Stevens. In Chapter Eleven, he presents the Ladder of Charitable Giving as articuled by the 12th Century Jewish mystic Maimonides. Nine hundred years later, too many of us have not learned from his important insights. Here is the ladder from the lowest form of charity to the highest form.

1. A person gives, but only when asked by the poor.
2. A person gives, but is glum when giving.
3. A person gives cheerfully, but less than he or she should.
4. A person gives without being asked, but gives diretly to the poor. Now the poor know who gave them help and the giver, too, knows whom he or she benefited.
5. A person throws money into the house of someone who is poor. The poor person does not know to whom he or she is indebted, but the donor knows who has been helped.
6. A person gives a donation n a certain place and then turns his or her back in order not to know which of the poor has been helped, but the poor person knows to whom he or she is indebted.
7. A person gives anonymously to a fund for the poor. Here the poor person does not know to whom he or she is indebted, and the donor does not know who has been helped. But, the highest is this:
8. Money is give to preven another from becoming poor, such as provdiding him or her with a job, teaching the person a trade, or setting up the person in business. Thus, the recipient will not be forece to the dreadful alternative of holding out a hand for charity. This is the highest step and the summit of charity's golden ladder. (78)

Pope John Paul II said that poverty isn't so much about money as it is about being excluded from networks of productivity and exchange. There are many today who bemoan materialism as expressed in our modern day consumerism. Yet many of those who protest consumerism take a materilistic view of the poor. Their primary objective is to redistribute wealth away from those who have more than enough to consume (wasting it on things like jets and yachts) so that others can have more to consume (on things like food and health care). This view of poverty sees people primarily as consumers. We are not. We are stewards. We were made to participate in our own care and to participate in networks of productivity and exchange that benfit the community. That doesn't mean that wealth redistribution isn't a piece of addressing poverty but an anthropology that sees poverty primarily as is an issue of consumption is materialistic and dehumanizing.

A Philosopher Defends Religion

New York Times Review of Books: A Philosopher Defends Religion Book Review

The gulf in outlook between atheists and adherents of the monotheistic religions is profound. We are fortunate to live under a constitutional system and a code of manners that by and large keep it from disturbing the social peace; usually the parties ignore each other. But sometimes the conflict surfaces and heats up into a public debate. The present is such a time.

One of the things atheists tend to believe is that modern science is on their side, whereas theism is in conflict with science: that, for example, belief in miracles is inconsistent with the scientific conception of natural law; faith as a basis of belief is inconsistent with the scientific conception of knowledge; belief that God created man in his own image is inconsistent with scientific explanations provided by the theory of evolution. In his absorbing new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies, Alvin Plantinga, a distinguished analytic philosopher known for his contributions to metaphysics and theory of knowledge as well as to the philosophy of religion, turns this alleged opposition on its head. His overall claim is that “there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism.” By naturalism he means the view that the world describable by the natural sciences is all that exists, and that there is no such person as God, or anything like God. ...

Looks interesting.

Economists who are clergy

Marginal Revolution: Economists who are clergy

After noting Reverend Malthus and Israel Kirzner, Cowen writes:

Who else comes to mind?  The School of Salamanca, and going back many medieval theologians wrote on economic issues.  Paul Heyne.  Heinrich Pesch.  Galiani was an Abbey.  Philip Wicksteed was a Unitarian theologian.  The still underrated Richard Whately was the Archbishop of Dublin.  Bishop George Berkeley wrote on monetary theory, as did Reverend Jonathan Swift.

The 18th century clergyman John Witherspoon wrote on monetary economics.  Thomas Chalmers, who wrote on the Poor Laws and theories of underconsumption in the early 19th century, was ordained in the Church of Scotland.

Did all these 19th century figures really want to be economists, really want to be clergy, or both?

Any nominations? (And might I add, we need a whole lot more of them!)

I Am A Recovering Ideologue - Mike King

Mike King: I Am A Recovering Ideologue

I am a recovering ideologue. Ideologues often colonize environments and justify the use of dubious means to accomplish results supporting their ideologies. Because of their passionate advocacy, they are willing to throw people under the bus to advance their causes. They are black and white in their thinking. You’re either with them or against them. There is no middle ground. They see categories, not people. They guard against looking into the faces of real people, knowing that might shed light on the hypocrisy of their ideological dogmas.

If you think I’m talking about someone you radically disagree with, you just might be an ideologue. Perhaps a little self-reflection is in order.

We must ask ourselves, In what ways am I willing to twist a theological position just to advance a cause I believe in? We must learn to read Scripture over and against ourselves instead of assuming the warnings are always directed at the other and not ourselves.

Having come out of a conservative background (both politically and theologically), Ironically, I find it hard not to be dismissive of the people who are like the person I used to be. My world is more expansive now. As my world of relationships has expanded, I naively assumed political and theological liberals would be kinder and more progressive. However, I’ve learned that all ideologues are the same. They want their way. They’re right; you’re wrong. If you think differently, you’re an enemy. They label and dismiss those who don’t agree with their positions. ...

Nice post.

Paul thru Mediterranean Eyes– a Review Part One (Ben Witherington)

The Bible and Culture: Paul thru Mediterranean Eyes– a Review Part One (Ben Witherington)

What follows in the next ten days, is my extended review and critique of Ken Bailey’s latest book, which won a Christianity Today book award this past year. I have appreciated many of Ken’s interesting insights and perspectives over the years, and nothing I say in this review should be taken to mean that I have changed my mind about that. It is just that this book is not up to the rather high standards he has previously set and has some real issues that should be pointed out. Along the way, I will also point out some of the valuable insights one can gain from reading this book. BW3 ...

Persons Versus Individuals - Margarita Mooney

Black White and Gray: More than Individuals: How Personalism Influences Social Theory and Research

... [Christian] Smith writes that persons are not individuals, if the term individual is used to mean “discrete, self-contained, autonomous, self-existent selves,” (Smith, p. 67). Furthermore, persons are not “self-contained selves who subsequently engage and exchange with other selves in order to secure some outcome or consume some benefit” (Smith, p. 67). Further, he adds that “Persons, instead, are originally, constitutively and inescapably social, interactive, and communicative in origin and being” (Smith, p. 67). ...

... According to philosopher Karol Wojytla, it is precisely when acting with others that individuals become persons. In other words, the social and communal nature of action is rooted in the nature of the person: the person is social. Actions that lead to fulfillment or flourishing are social actions, in which one’s subjectivity becomes tied to another person or a group of persons. The actions of human persons are not individualistic but inter-subjective.

Although persons can and do act as rational actors, such as by exchanging things with others to maximize their utility, this reductionistic view of the person and of agency should not be  our model of the person. Such a reductionistic view overlooks moral commitments, constitutive-ends practices, and strong relationality. In my ongoing work on virtue ethics and sociology, I hope to move away from the enlightenment view of person that focuses on cognition and rationality and study persons as interacting bodies and inter-subjective actors.

"What is Personalism? A Rectification of Individualism and Collectivism" - Margarita Mooney

Black, White, and Gray: What is Personalism? A Rectification of Individualism and Collectivism - Margarita Mooney

... I was intrigued by the philosophy that could critique both the idea that economic prosperity is the final ends of individuals and societies and, at the same time, coherently argue against a collectivist system that denies private property, stifles free speech, and suppresses freedom of religion.

When I sat down to study Catholic social doctrine for the first time, what intrigued me was that the works I read started with basic questions such as: what is the good of human persons? What types of development uphold human dignity? Much of neoliberal economics seemed to be based on very utilitarian questions: what economic system will produce the greatest amount of goods and wealth? In achieving that goal of creating greater wealth, it seemed like almost any means could be accepted as long as the goal of generating utility was achieved by individuals unencumbered by others in their actions.

In contrast, collectivism, such as that practiced in communist countries, upholds the good of the group–also normally defined in material terms–over the good of individuals. Although some the goals of social solidarity may be laudable, I found the means of denying individual dissent, disallowing free expression, and the general coercion and manipulation rampant in communist systems to be an affront to human dignity. ...

... According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, personalism is a term that refers to at least 20 different philosophers and other scholars who, in general, defend the inviolability of the person, stress the fundamental relationally of persons, see the person as a subject and object of free action, and emphasize the person is a center of meaning and value. Schmeising emphasizes the theological influences and religious backgrounds of many personalists (including many converts from atheism to Catholicism such as Maritain and Edith Stein). Perhaps because of the metaphysical training of many personalists, personalists argue for the importance of both body and spirit to understanding the person, thus opens them up to the reality of transcendence.

Personalism contrasts with Marxist materialism and other forms of collectivism in which the individual is subsumed to the communal and the individual has no inherent worth. Personalism, by contrast, argues that a person can never be simply the means to another end, but each person must be treated as an end in and of himself. Liberal individualism too often conflates utility and value, but personalism also rejects the utilitarian idea that a person’s utility is the same as his value. Another way of stating that a person’s worth is not reducible to the profit she or he makes is expressed when Schmeising quotes Maurin as saying “the foundation of the economy should be the ‘person, not profit.’” (p. 23)

To the extent that our economic system is flawed, Schmeising states that Maurin and other personalists would argue that we can’t fix our economic problems on by re-organizing economic structure, but we must also re-organize the economy around spiritual or human values as well. In this sense, Schmeising identifies Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s work on human development as being influenced by personalists insights. ...

I continue to struggle with how to articulate my own views on economics but I have come to the conclusion that my perspective is some variety of Christian economic personalism. The person is the central point of reflection. Individuals have the ability to subjectively reflect on their circumstances and, with some degree of autonomy, make choices. While humanity may collectively reflect the image of God it is also true that each individual is also a reflection of that image and therefore to be treated with dignity and respect. We are more than mere animals with material needs. While we are individuals we are made for community, and indeed we cannot become human individuals without community. Furthermore, we have an imperative to live in harmony with others and to seek the welfare of others as we seek our own welfare. I look forward to Money's promised posts.

Why Business Matters to God

Mark D. Roberts: Why Business Matters to God

This past weekend, Laity Lodge hosted a retreat on the topic: Christians in the Marketplace: What would it Look Like if God Was Running the Show? Our speakers were Tod Bolsinger, Senior Pastor of San Clemente Presbyterian Church in California and Jeff Van Duzer, Dean of the School of Business and Economics at Seattle Pacific University, Washington. From their different perspectives and on the basis of their diverse experiences, both Tod and Jeff challenged us to think creatively as Christians about business. Many of those who attended this retreat are business owners and/or leaders.

Both speakers commented on the fact that most of us who seek to follow Christ have not done much deep thinking about business. We have tended to uncritically endorse either of two popular options. One idolizes capitalism and the market. The other demonizes capitalism and the market. Thus, we are desperately in need of careful, creative thinking about business in light of God’s purposes for the world and for us as creatures created in his image. ...

I had the privilege of attending this conference last week and finally got to meet people like Mark Roberts and Jeff Van Duzer face-to-face. It was one of the best conferences I've atteneded on this topic. Later this year I expect to blog through Van Duzer's  book Why Business Matters to God: (And What Still Needs to Be Fixed).

New Bible translation has screenplay format

Sacramento Bee: New Bible translation has screenplay format

... Even people who have never read the Bible could probably guess that other translations don't say Adam pointed his finger at Eve when he blamed her for his disobedience. Neither do other Bibles describe Eve as "excited" about her newborn son.

That's pure Hollywood, but the team behind "The Voice" says it isn't a gimmick. They hope this new version will help readers understand the meaning behind the sometimes archaic language of the Bible and enjoy the story enough to stick with it.

The idea was a longtime dream of Chris Seay, pastor of Houston's Ecclesia Church. Seay had had success in helping church members relate to the Bible by dividing out the parts of the various speakers and assigning roles to church members who read them aloud.

The idea struck a nerve with Frank Couch, the vice president of translation development for Nashville-based religious publisher Thomas Nelson, who had performed Bible-inspired sketches on the streets of Berkeley, Calif., in his youth.

The result of their efforts, as well as a team of translators who worked alongside poets, writers and musicians, is "The Voice," released in its full version earlier this year. ...

Hmmm ... Not sure what to think about this one.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/07/30/4673244/new-bible-translation-has-screenplay.html#storylink=cpy

F. S. Michaels on Story and Economics

To the degree she is making the point about distinguishing between a market economy versus a market society, I think she may have something to offer. But I think she has caricatured the economic way of thinking. I sense the creation of a straw man. Also, I find it curious that she uses the monoculture of science and its triumph over Medieval religion (something most intellectuals celebrate) as a parallel for the rising monoculture of economics (which she appears to be setting up as unholy development.)

She is right about stories. The Medieval world had a story and the scientific empirical analysis of the world (including examining how things work at the molecular and atomic level) unraveled and reshaped many aspects of the story. The analysis of micro(atomic/molecular)-economic behavior and emprical analysis is a threat to many present-day ideologies and philosohies ... "stories," if you will ... that make unemprical macro-level truth claims about the human condition.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not suggesting that economics is the product of sinless actors without ideological constraint. There are challenges. But I worry here that Michaels comes off sounding like ... borrowing the "Medieval church versus science" construct ...  a priest of the old order whose metanarrative is under siege. I know I see this in many conversations about the interaction between theology and economics. I've ordered her book and I'll be curious to see what she has to say.

Her book is: Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything

Mark Roberts on Work

Mark D. Roberts: Work and God . . . Oops! The Times Gets It Very Wrong

"... So, Kreider’s assertion that God invented work as punishment reveals a double problem. His understanding of God and his understand of work are lacking. If he had done a bit of homework, actually reading Genesis 1-3, Kreider would have discovered that God set up an antidote to busyness in the very beginning: the Sabbath. Not only did God create human beings to do meaningful work, but also he created a day each week for rest, rest that entails much more than mere idleness.

If Tim Kreider were alone in his view that our work really doesn’t matter and that it is a punishment from God, I would probably not be griping. But, unfortunately, Kreider’s perspective is common, even among Jews and Christians who should know better. What we need today is not a four-hour work day and lots of time off, but rather an understanding of work that see its potential value as well as an understanding of rest that goes deeper than mere idleness."

Bingo!

Evangelicals Should Be Gospel Centered, Not Salvation Centered, Theologian Says

Christian Post: Evangelicals Should Be Gospel Centered, Not Salvation Centered, Theologian Says

Evangelical Christianity has been shaped by a "salvation culture," but should strive for a "Gospel culture," says Dr. Scot McKnight, professor of religious studies at Northern Seminary.

"The Gospel of salvation has produced what I call a 'salvation culture' – a culture marked by who's in and who's out. So a very strong sense of 'we are the in group and others are the out group.' ... A 'Gospel culture' is a culture shaped by following Jesus, by living under Jesus as King. A 'Gospel culture' includes personal salvation, but it includes so much more," McKnight said in an interview with The Christian Post. ...

...McKnight noted that even in the "great commission," (Matthew 28:19-20) the emphasis is not on getting people to make decisions, but on making disciples.

"It didn't say, 'go and get people to make decisions.' It said 'make disciples.' How? Teaching them to observe everything I have commanded. So the goal is to get people to become disciples of Jesus by obeying all that Jesus taught."

Getting Western evangelicals to change from a salvation culture to a Gospel culture would be difficult, McKnight believes, because the salvation culture represents a core part of evangelical identity. But the good news is that renewal is also a core part of evangelical identity. ...

For Schools of Theology, It's Time to Bend Tradition

The Chronicle of Higher Education: For Schools of Theology, It's Time to Bend Tradition

Much talk and energy have been devoted lately to discerning the "future of the seminary" in North America. That future is uncertain, with many theological institutions facing financial difficulties and steadily declining enrollments. The larger challenge, however, may be cultural. If seminaries hope to survive, they will have to adapt to a changing world.

Two years ago, David Sebastian, dean of the School of Theology at Anderson University, reported five trends shaping the future of theological education in North America. They are: a widening chasm between Christian churches and seminaries; increasing numbers of seminary students who have not grown up in the church; a growing awareness that seminary education is inaccessible for many potential seminary students; an increased questioning of whether seminary is really worth the financial costs; and forthcoming population shifts that will affect the ability of seminaries to prepare culturally competent leaders for the 21st century.

Those trends, in addition to declining membership in some American churches, suggest that there is a need for theological schools to rethink their role in theological training in order to remain financially self-sustaining and to train leaders for an increasingly global church. Their problem is not that they need to retain their place in the academy, but rather that they need to justify their existence to Christian churches, which are becoming more ethnically diverse. ...

The Church's Contribution to the Corruption of Business

I am across this video clip last night by Noah Riner, a MBA student at Stanford. His observation is the constant refrain I've heard from businesspeople, over and over and over again, throughout my life.

Charles North and Bob Smietana wrote a book four years ago called Good Intentions: Nine Hot-Button Issues Viewed Through the Eyes of Faith. They make this observation:

In interviewing businesspeople for her book Church on Sunday, Work on Monday, [Laura] Nash discovered a chasm between how businesspeople and their pastors saw economics. Pastors and church leaders talked in restrictive terms about the need to limit greed. The businesspeople in their congregations had a different view.

Business people took a positive, additive view: faith was about expanding economic opportunity for more people through business success," says Nash. "For the business person, business was about solving problems and creating prosperity and it centered on specific activities."

The message from the church is that, while occupations like social work, teaching, or medicine are worthy vocations for Christians, participation in business is almost exclusively an exercise in sin management. There is no theology that affirms and guides the shalom-generating contribution that business makes in the world. Particularly ironic is to a see a theologian occupying the Sally Smith Chair of Theology, a position endowed by some prosperous businessperson, articulating blanket condemnations of business, markets and profit.

There are a number of reasons that predispose those who work in church institutional structures against business. I won't be addressing those here today. Rather, I want to highlight that the church offers no narrative and no support to businesspeople trying to navigate the waters of our modern economy. Then episodes of businesspeople behaving poorly come on the horizon. The response from churches? "See! We told you have evil those businesspeople really are." Then comes a whole new round of sermons, articles, and blog posts about consumerism and resisting greed. We are told to put our social justice badge on our sleeve, to run out the door, and to go Occupy Wall Street.

Well, I've got a better suggestion. How about we church leaders go look into mirror? Then we will see the weak link. Then how about we go occupy Main Street? How about we go into the lives and businesses of the businesspeople in our own congregations, learning what challenges they face and what visions animate them in their work. Instead of an endless barrages of caution and condemnation, how about we find ways to be a church that affirms and guides businesspeople as they live out Christian vocation. Granted, it isn't as sexy as protesting in the streets, but there will be no meaningful move toward a more shalom-filled world without it.

Referring Jesus

Urban Perspectives: Referring Jesus  Bob Lupton

Your phone rings.  It’s the receptionist at the front desk.  She says there is a lady there who is asking for food.  You glance out your office window and observe an unfamiliar car parked in the church parking lot.  A man is behind the wheel.  You assume it is the car the lady at the front desk arrived in.  You close your laptop and walk down the hall, checking your spirit for any ignoble attitudes – residue from previous disconcerting encounters with the needy.  You will want to give this woman the benefit of the doubt, listen to her story with empathy and understanding.  But how will you know if what she tells you is the truth?  To even ask for verification will expose your suspicion.  Besides, you do not have the time right now to spend getting involved in what could be a complicated situation.  Your past experience has taught you that a request for food is often merely the tip of a pathological iceberg. 

 

You greet her with a handshake and your warmest pastoral smile.  You listen attentively to her story.  It is believable enough and you do not question a word of it, not verbally anyway.  Her demeanor and attire offer no conflicting clues.  But you do not invite her into your office.  You take her request for food at face value and instruct the receptionist to fill a box from the food pantry and give it to the woman.  In less than five minutes the woman has thanked you profusely and has exited to the waiting car.  You return to your office, watch the car pull out of the lot, and settle back down at your laptop.  You have fed the hungry, you reassure yourself, given freely with no strings attached.  Now you can return to your sermon preparation.

 

But for some reason you find it difficult to stay focused on your reading material.  Your concentration is distracted by an uneasiness that disturbs your spirit.  Did you merely “expedite” this woman, dispatch her with an easy handout?  Come to think of it, you didn’t even get her name.  But you did give freely – that counts for something.  Should you have offered to pray with her?  Actually, she seemed rather relieved that you didn’t push for a more involved interview.  She was probably just as happy that she got what she came for without being subjected to a counseling session.  Yes, you handled it properly.  Back to the Sunday sermon.

 

But what if she was hustling, making the rounds to churches all over town?  Taking advantage of caring people?  Selling the food to support a destructive drug habit?  You would have no way of knowing if your charity was helping or hurting.  Not without some sort of an accountability system.  Where are all these questions coming from?!  Too late to do anything about it now anyway, too many Sunday responsibilities pressing in.  Maybe next week.  Right now you have a sermon to prepare. 

 

But the disquieting thoughts persist. You decide to weave some self-disclosing remarks into your sermon about the biblical mandate to care for the poor and the difficulty in this culture of doing it rightly.  Perhaps this will provide you some measure of closure. 

 

But by Monday, with the issue still churning in your viscera, you come to the conviction that it is God who is troubling your spirit.  You must face this dilemma and address it head on.  You call a fellow pastor to see how he deals with similar situations.  He tells you about a program that has been a godsend.  A Cooperative Food Ministry (CFM) that is supported by several churches in the area.  Participating churches collect food on their assigned Sunday, volunteers take it to the CFM center,  the CFM director records each donation, documents each recipient, accounts for each distribution, connects to a county-wide computer system that safeguards against fraud and double-dipping.  The cost is minimal, it provides good service opportunities for church volunteers, it is well-managed and accountable, and it fulfills the biblical mandate of feeding the hungry.  It’s the ideal solution, your pastor friend tells you.

 

YES!  This is just what you needed to hear.  It should be easy to make the case to your elder board that shifting the church food pantry to the CFM would be a much better way to minister to the poor.  Much more efficient and responsible.  It would eliminate those awkward interviews to get at the truthfulness of stories.  It would resolve those worrisome tensions over responsible or irresponsible stewardship.  CFM will handle all of this.  They’re the experts, after all.  A good accountable referral system is definitely what is needed.

                                                           __________________

 

But you find that the new system doesn’t relieve all your anxiety.  Why does it still linger?   Why do you feel like in some way you have referred Jesus away from your door?   What is it about poor people, anyway, that so disquiets one’s spirit?  Their intrusiveness, the way they interrupt your schedule, the demands they place on your time especially when you are drawn into personal involvement with them.  And there seems never to be a clear solution to their plight, always more complicated than you were first led to believe.  

 

You wonder, in your more courageous moments, if all this might somehow be more about your own salvation than that of those you are trying to help.  Might the appearance of Jesus in the form of a needy person be divine light to illuminate darker places in your soul – lack of compassion, self-protection, self-importance, impatience?   Ouch!  Too much reflection like this could be downright depressing.  Good sermon material perhaps.   But what over-worked pastor is going to relinquish control of his or her tightly packed calendar?   Not a chance.  It would be irresponsible.  You just wish Jesus had been a little more understanding of the priest and Levite in his Good Samaritan story. 

 

Your phone rings again.         

Dallas Willard: Taking Theology and Spiritual Disciplines into the Marketplace

This is a wonderful lecture!

Two great quotes. On the centrality of how we see "the gospel" and salvation. He has just been speaking about salvation being an invitation to enter the Kingdom of God here and now:

“Are we preaching a gospel that has a natural tendency to produce disciples or do we simply preach a gospel that generates consumers of religious goods and services. A gospel of mere forgiveness does not produce disciples. … We are now wedded to a gospel that does not produce disciples in any regular connection and that’s how we get a culture of Christians who are not disciples. And that’s where we are today. And if we’re going to deal seriously with this issue of taking theology and spiritual disciplines into the workplace we have to recognize where the problem is. And the problem is, what we get by grace through the gospel does not extend to the workplace. There’s no conceptual connection between being saved, as that is commonly understood, and taking our workplace for Christ.” Minute 36

What is discipleship?

“I’m learning from him [Jesus] how to lead my life in the Kingdom of God as he would lead my life if he were I.” Minute 37:50

Also:

“The church is for discipleship but discipleship is for the world, the world under God.” 58:30

“Salvation is participating in the life that Jesus is now living on earth.” 58:50

Is the world getting better?

Dallas Morning News: Is the world getting better?

Centre College professor Beau Weston operates an interesting blog, the Gruntled Center. He put up a post last week that draws from a lecture he recently gave at his Kentucky college. In the post and lecture, Weston, a Presbyterian, makes the argument that the world has gotten better.

He notes how violence is down in most "competent" nations, authoritarianism is in retreat worldwide, various forms of discrimination have diminished, food production is growing exponentially, air quality has improved, the population bomb has been a dud and transportation costs are cheaper. He lists a number of other indices, which you can read about on this link.

So, here is the question for the week:

Is the world getting better?

We certainly read a lot in, yes, newspapers about things going awry. Republican candidates making the case against Barack Obama offer ample examples of the world being a mess. And many a book has been sold about the next coming crisis.

But are we looking at all this the wrong way. Is it indeed the case that the world is getting better? ...

The article goes on to list the responses by several religious leaders. Weston looked at a wide range of social indicators. While we can quibble about precise definitions of better, it is without question that on balance the overwhelming majority of manifestations of what social scientists generally associate with well-being are getting better for more people.

Now because I have written on this topic several times, and I know how determined people are to hear me (and people like Weston) say what was not said, let me be clear. "Better" is not a synonym for perfect. "Better" is not a synonym for the consummated Kingdom of God. "Better" is an adjective that speaks to the condition of something being in a more desirable state relative to another state. On most of the key measures of human well-being, things are getting better.

The profound reluctance by so many people in theological institutions to acknowledge that the world is getting better on a host of measures never ceases to amaze me. If you read some of the responses, people counter the claim that we are living in a period of rapid decline in worldwide violence by pointing to events in Syria. Imagine if there were 100 house fires in your city last year and this year there year there were only ten. Would you say there has been an improvement in the rate of house fires? And what would you say to someone who pointed to a neighbor's house (one of the ten that burned) as evidence that there was no improvement in house fires?

One of the respondents was Cynthia Rigby at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. She writes:

In the year 2000, the United Nations made a "Millenium Goal" of eradicating extreme global poverty by the year 2015. This goal will not be reached, nor will any significant strides have been made toward reaching it.

The goal was not eliminate poverty but to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015. From yesterday's New York Times: Dire Poverty Falls Despite Global Slump, Report Finds:

WASHINGTON — A World Bank report shows a broad reduction in extreme poverty — and indicates that the global recession, contrary to economists’ expectations, did not increase poverty in the developing world.

The report shows that for the first time the proportion of people living in extreme poverty — on less than $1.25 a day — fell in every developing region from 2005 to 2008. And the biggest recession since the Great Depression seems not to have thrown that trend off course, preliminary data from 2010 indicate.

The progress is so drastic that the world has met the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half five years before its 2015 deadline.

“This is very good news,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the United Nations’ special adviser on the Millennium Development Goals. “There has been broad-based progress in fighting poverty, and accelerating progress. There’s a lot to be happy about.” ...

Rigby continues:

Food production may be growing, but there are more undernourished people living on the planet than there were fifteen years ago (the Food and Agricultural Association of the United Nations reports that there were 824 million undernourished people in 1996 and 925 million in 2010). This is the case even though (according to statistics provided by the Word Bank), the number of people in the world making less than $1.25 a day decreased from 1.94 billion to 1.29 billion from 2005-2008. The large number of natural disasters, in recent years, is one reason why there are more undernourished people even though there are fewer people who make less than $1.25 a day. There are roughly 100 million people, worldwide, who do not have homes (think: 12 times the population of New York City).

How should people of faith interpret these statistics?

Here is how this person of faith interprets those statistics. There were 5,766,435,620 people in 1996 and there were 6,840,423,256 in 2010. So lets do some math:

Percentage of the world population undernourished:

• 1996: 14.3% = 825 million / 5,766 million
• 2010: 13.5% = 925 million / 6,840 million

We have a modest improvement in the percentage of people that are undernourished. The growth in the absolute number of people who are undernourished is about to plateau and then begin to decline. In other words, the world is getting better! Responses like the ones in the newspaper article are indicative of the mindset in the Mainline theological establishment.

I routinely reflect on where this hyper-sensitivity to acknowledge improvement comes from. What I think I read between the lines is a fear that if improvement is acknowledged that this somehow is an invitation to stop pursuing an even better world. If I have a friend who is trying to lose 50 pounds and he tells be me that so far he has lost 35 pounds, then is acknowledging that his weight has gotten "better" a signal that he should stop trying? Can there can be no celebration until the fiftieth pound is lost? If anything, my friend will be motivated to press on. Celebration of milestones give us greater motivation just as those who are wrestling with human flourishing issues around the world get encouraged by improvement and want to see more of it, better and faster.

At any rate, Bill Clinton was right, "There is a lot of good news out there. We are going to have to learn to deal with it."

For some excellent resources I would recommend three interesting books:

Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

Upside: Surprising Good News About the State of our World by Bradley Wright

For the single best video that illustrates what is happening in the world you need to see Hans Rosling’s four minute video below. The Diamandis video just come out and it is very helpful as well.